Break Glass in Case of a Zü Shutdown

At my first house meeting after moving to Humphries House, or the Zü, a student proposed that we use our grocery budget to buy non-food items. This was the end of the fall 2024 semester, and we wanted to make the most of our grocery budget while we still had it. The house agreed to this proposal, and everyone was allotted $50 to buy non-food grocery items such as soaps, lotions, clothes, and flowers. I didn’t really need anything, but I’d always wanted an orchid; I bought one for my room and one for the living room. 

Weeks later, on a Friday evening just before the spring semester was set to begin, Humphries House residents received an email from Senior Associate Dean of Students Dean Gendron stating that “financial transactions made on behalf of Humphries House in December 2024 represent a significant violation of College policy,” and as a result of our violation, the food co-op would be suspended for the semester.

I moved to the Zü after seeing a poster on my way out of Valentine Dining Hall (Val) during my first semester after transferring to Amherst College. The poster featured a dormitory hallway overlaid with text. It said something like, “are you tired of sterile interior design? Move to the Zü food co-op!” The poster pointed out a culture of collected solipsism I had felt but didn’t have the words or the wherewithal to describe. 

The solipsism revealed itself to me subtly but consistently over the course of several familiar incidents. Earlier that week, I’d left behind a book in my dorm common room, and when I returned to grab it, I found a note informing me that my item had been confiscated, with a citation reminding me of the college policy outlawing the presence of personal belongings in communal areas. When I had gone to pick up my laundry earlier that day, I found that someone had thrown my wet clothes on the floor to make room for their own. Just before I saw the Zü’s recruitment poster, I had sat down to dinner across from another student. I complimented their shirt, and they thanked me before putting their AirPods back in and turning up the volume. We ate together, alone. 

At the time, my plan for dealing with this culture was dropping out, so when I was offered the promise of an authentic community, I moved immediately. The last thing I expected from my decision to move was that it would implicate me in alleged financial fraud. At my first house meeting, we bought each other flowers, and at my second, we were trying to save the co-op.

It took more than two weeks for the administration to tell us what we did wrong and why our student Community Advisor (CA) and House Coordinator had been fired, kicked out of the house, and were now facing disciplinary action. Humphries House residents, including myself, were not only punished for violating college policy, but we also stood accused of financial fraud and “severe violations of law” stemming from our communal decision to buy personal items from Whole Foods. The administration informed us that the school-provided cards, which we rely on for our food, were tax-exempt under the condition that items purchased with those cards were for communal purposes. Our soaps, lotions, and flowers were considered “personal items,” and as such, we had placed the college in legal jeopardy (though I’ve never understood how this could be anything beyond an issue of college policy). Nobody at Humphries House, including the students who had been trained by the college to shop for the house, had been informed of this distinction. Amherst was punishing us for violating a policy we never knew existed.

I expected the Zü to offer home-cooked meals and more humane interior design, but my first semester there felt more like a war room. Our alleged criminal activity forced us back on the meal plan, so we made a pact to sit together in order to simulate the domestic arrangement of dinner at home, pilfering raw ingredients from the salad bar in order to cook various egg-based breakfasts at the house (they could take our food, but they couldn’t take our kitchen). We strategized about our responses to administrative aggression; we democratically approved carefully worded emails and unanimously signed our names. We spoke to Zü alumni to see if they could wield any external authority to advocate for us on our behalf. Several house members suggested more explicit protests, but we promised one another that we wouldn’t draw public attention to the incident to protect our CA and House Coordinator’s reputations. We apologized profusely for wrongs we didn’t understand; we responded to terminally vague accusations with polite requests for clarity; we even offered to personally reimburse the college despite our confusion.

I liked my illegal orchids; I gave them both names, and they probably survived longer than Whole Foods orchids are expected to live. I like cooking. Now that our cooking and purchasing privileges have been restored, my friend Du Bai ’26 and I have prepared and served progressively more complex meals sourced from Michelin chef cookbooks and YouTube shorts. I even like washing dishes; I prefer having to do the work myself rather than handing off the responsibility to invisible staff behind a dining hall wall.

I don’t like sending emails and negotiating with a dysfunctional bureaucracy. I don’t like standing accused of tax fraud, nor do I like apologizing without meaning it. It’s hard to say that I enjoyed living in the Zü without the co-op, without the lentils and the ice cream and the laughter around the dining room table. But even during this period of suspended operations, the Zü was still providing its residents with an authentic community. The college’s bureaucratic opacity and malfeasance had turned the administration into the Zü’s antagonist, and a common antagonist is a fantastic engine for community formation. We were in a fight together, and this fight brought us closer than flowers, dishes, or furniture ever could.

After weeks of trading emails, we eventually secured a meeting with the administrators who oversaw Humphries House. Gendron, Dean of Students Angie Tissi-Gassoway, Associate Director of Residential Life Leigh Bucey, and Community Development Coordinator Devyn Cade came to Humphries House to discuss our violation, punishment, and the future of the house. The meeting lasted for over two and a half hours. We apologized again for our mistake and reiterated that our training had never mentioned the policy that we violated. We expressed our frustration at the way punishment had been handed down — without specificity as to the alleged offense, on a Friday evening over winter break — and frustration at the continued opacity of the administration’s communications. Our explanations of our side of the story soon bled into justifications for the house’s existence, emotional anecdotes about the irreplaceable value the Zü had for campus life, as well as our own lives at Amherst. Some students cried; the administrators took note and promised to send future communications at more convenient times than a Friday evening before the start of the semester. Tissi-Gassoway then gave us a lecture on the legal gravity of our purchases, and we all nodded along.

Previous generations of Zü residents have faced conflict with Amherst College. In 2023, Zü residents negotiated with the administration on the subject of their constitution, which, by that point, was terribly out of date. The primary issue under discussion then was the minimum number of house residents that the Office of Community Living would permit to return to the Zü at the beginning of each semester. Authentic communities cannot be recreated from scratch every semester; they must be developed over time and with the guidance of members with institutional memory. The 2023 constitutional effort fought for and won a two-thirds minimum quota of returning Zü residents, and that victory is part of what has enabled the Zü to maintain its place as a hub of campus culture.

New attacks require new defense strategies. With the spirit of the 2023 constitutional effort in mind, we began revising our house constitution, or as it was soon called, “The ConstiZütion.” There were logistical reasons why such a document would prove itself useful to Humphries House residents. The ConstiZütion would give a formal structure to procedurally disorganized house meetings, provide a proper venue for deliberation on motions that required communal participation (organizing parties, pointing out unfinished chores), and offer new residents a record of institutional memory. Our weekly “ConstiZütional Conventions” also served a broader, ideological function. The college had taken our emails and statements as individual complaints; for the administration to recognize the Zü as a community rather than an assortment of complaining individuals, we needed to draft a declaration of our collectivity. 

Life under the state of administrative exception continued for months. With graduation fast approaching, we realized that it was no longer a viable strategy to fight for a reopened co-op that semester, so we’d settled on a mutual understanding with the administration that the co-op would return again in the fall, replete with revised training guidelines for those in charge of house purchases. Then, on the afternoon of Friday, March 7, we received another email informing us that Humphries House had not received enough applications for the fall semester, and the co-op would thus remain suspended indefinitely.

Within minutes, we were gathered in front of Tissi-Gassoway’s office, who was in charge of the housing office that had issued the latest news. The administrators had explicitly promised that they wouldn’t tell us critical information on Friday evenings and had apologized for the timing of their first message, but now they’d done the same thing again. The Theme House application deadline had passed. If we didn’t reverse the administration’s decision before the weekend, we’d never get a chance again.

Sweaty and out of breath, we met Tissi-Gassoway and Gendron as they were coming out of an all-faculty meeting in Converse. Alongside myself and a few underclassmen, the group included seniors with nothing to lose, and they were pissed. Through gritted teeth, they explained that every year at this time, Humphries House holds a recruitment dinner where we introduce Amherst students to life at the co-op and convince them to apply. But this semester, we didn’t have communal dinners because of the suspension. There weren’t enough Humphries House applicants because the school had suspended Humphries House. We asked Gendron to extend the recruitment period and provide a modest budget to hold a recruitment dinner several times. The meeting took nearly an hour and a lecture about the legal gravity of buying flowers, but finally, they agreed. This time, the administrators didn’t apologize for their Friday afternoon email.

We hosted our dinner and immediately recruited nineteen students to live at the Zü, far more than necessary to reopen the food co-op. I’d been living in Humphries House for several months, but for the first time, I had the certainty that I’d also eventually be part of a food co-op, as advertised. As graduation neared, a senior asked me why I’d moved to the Zü, and I told the story of the poster I saw in Val, and how thankful I was that someone had designed it. I was told that soon after I saw the poster, the college had removed all copies from campus and disciplined its creator, citing a college policy on disrespecting other housing organizations that the poster had violated. Without the poster, I would’ve dropped out, and the college had deemed it illegal.

The Zü has a reputation for being the campus’s home for “alternative” culture, a characterization which goes hand in hand with the thought that the house is “dirty” and its residents are “weird.”  I take issue with all of these characterizations. The only reason we call a house of shared responsibility “alternative” is that the college has chosen to maximize the privileges of luxury rather than entrusting students with authority. With this authority comes responsibility over the house’s appearance, and it should come as no surprise that busy college students don’t have as much time and attention as paid campus staff (can you really call your dorm common room clean if you had no hand in cleaning it?). These responsibilities have a way of giving people the chance to express themselves in ways that wouldn’t be permitted or possible in a normal college setting — we can call their development “weird,” but doesn’t it make more sense to see them as coming into maturity, becoming an individual?

The Zü’s suspension last year and the recent announcement of Hampshire College’s closure should be warnings to future Zü residents and Amherst College students. When people in power call others “alternative,” they imply that the alternative won’t last. They mean that alternative culture has a certain charm, that it hosts good parties or produces interesting art, but that the dynamics that made the mainstream dominant will eventually stampede any and all alternatives. In the long-run, the international hedge fund that finances Amherst College will survive, and alternative education offered at Hampshire College will fail. In the long run, the laws of infinite endowment growth dictate that the college will build more dormitories and fill its student center with more luxuries, always approaching the project of simulating upper-class American life for its students, and in the food co-op will be overrun. 

Zü residents offer one another an education in shouldering responsibilities, and a fundamental principle of this education is that more important than any single mistake is the quality of one’s reaction to it. We made a mistake last January, and the administration’s response consisted of attacks on students’ reputations, repeated failures to live up to their promises, and the irrational decision to rob seniors of their final semester in the Zü. Mistakes and responsibilities go hand in hand; it is, in fact, a sign of authentic responsibility that one makes mistakes and that those mistakes have consequences. A proper relationship between the semi-autonomous co-op and the college should be one founded on trust and mutually achievable goals, but the severity of the college’s reaction in this case, along with the college’s expectation that college students exercise a standard of administrative excellence which they themselves don’t achieve, leaves no room for mutual cooperation or understanding, and in fact fosters a relationship based on distrust, animosity, and fear. Future Zü residents will make more mistakes, and we have no guarantee how the administration will react. 

When the Zü shuts down, no one will realize that it happened. It will be introduced as a temporary suspension, and when the campus forgets about the strange co-op on its fringes, the suspension will be upgraded to “indefinite.” The kitchen will be renovated over the summer to take out all fire hazards, like the oven and the stove. The house’s constitution will be rewritten to abolish the provision mandating a minimum quota of returners. The piping will be replaced as part of an environmental initiative that will render the dishwasher obsolete. The erasure is already partially underway. Last year, we begged the Amherst administration not to touch our beloved wallpaper, and they gave us their word that it would remain. We returned to find the flowers that once lined our stairs painted over with a hue best described as emergency room blue. As goes the wallpaper, so goes the papal conclave simulations, the gatherings with professors around wine and cheese, the dirty pans, the backyard basketball, and the front yard sock wrestling. We’ll know the erasure is complete when nobody recognizes “the Zü,” and everyone knows “Humphries House.”

Contrary to the Office of Community Engagement’s emails, communities aren’t built on experiences or privileges, but are constructed around shared responsibilities. This is a tough pill for a school as wealthy as Amherst to swallow: Amherst’s lack of a general, authentic community is a problem that cannot be solved by throwing money at it, but rather by entrusting students with authority over their own lives and institutions. Sushi bars are a privilege; communal responsibility is a blessing. The former is a luxury to be enjoyed and forgotten, the latter demands something of you; it asks you to rise above your petty individual desires and be good for others. This is the liberal arts in action, and it has nothing to do with the classroom. 

Ignorance, not malice, will shut down the Zü. What we’ve built so far is contingent on students fighting for their right to govern themselves, but it will collapse as soon as the administration discovers that the principle of personal responsibility runs contrary to the college’s slow crawl towards institutional homogenization. The way forward is to assert our collectivity in as many ways as we can. Nowadays, we do this every Friday by holding Shabbat. 

Critics might say that the Zü’s version of Shabbat isn’t very traditional. Sometimes Selma Acar ’27E leads us in a Jewish song (she’s Muslim). Sometimes, Adela Thompson Page ’26 gets us to play wiffleball in the backyard. Sometimes I discover too late that my challah’s yeast has expired. It’s all really quite nice. I invite you, reader, to come next week, May 8. We start at 8 p.m.