College Community Celebrates Inauguration of Michael Elliott ’92 as 20th President

On Oct. 28, a brisk Friday afternoon, an estimated 1,200 students, faculty, alumni, and other members of the college community gathered in front of the War Memorial to watch the inauguration of Michael Elliott ’92 as the 20th president of Amherst College. The inauguration followed a packed day of events kicking off Homecoming weekend, which included open houses for the Emily Dickinson Museum and the Office of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, as well as a conversation in the Mead Art Museum about the history of Amherst’s presidents.

The inauguration featured a number of speeches from members of the Amherst community. Speakers included an alumni, several professors, Elliott’s successor as the dean of Emory College, the Association of Amherst Students President Sirus Wheaton ’23, and Haoran Tong ’23, who read an original poem. In addition, the event featured performances from the Amherst Symphony Orchestra and the Glee Club.

In his speech, Wheaton centered on a message of hope, telling those gathered that “Amherst’s future is something I will always hope for. We here at Amherst are special. We are zesty, we are full of curiosity, and life and culture, and I will never ever place my bets against us changing the world.”

Tong’s poem, titled “Our Story Keeps Writing Itself,” focused on what it means to spend time at Amherst: “We collect a fleeting sense of permanence, breathing the same transience of an unstable time for our lives to steadily tremble/to grow with fractures, yet develop still/ to fill our eyes with sparks of memories and find our hearts a home.”

Following these presentations, several members of the community presented Elliott with the gifts of the President’s Office, which included “keys to the college,” a cane, as well as the college seal and charter.

Elliott then gave an address to the audience, focusing on one question he said has “consistently perplexed and bewildered [him]: What does it mean to love a place?”

“We come to love this place, because this is where we feel something in ourselves that seems in woefully short supply right now,” he said. “We feel optimism. … We feel the possibility of becoming, of growth, of stumbling forward into a better future for ourselves and for our world. Our love endures because we know that the future can be greater than the past.”

Elliott also addressed his aspirations for Amherst’s future. “We need the sensibility that is at the core of a liberal education, which is relentless in its search for truth, rigorous in its evaluation of evidence, and rooted in ethical reasoning,” he said. “That sensibility guides Amherst in our shared vision for the future. It is the basis of our claim to educate students who can lead meaningful lives and lead the society in which they live.”

He concluded with a message to students, telling them, “This Amherst is now yours. You may come to love it in the way I described, or you may not.” He added that a liberal arts education is a “verb” that requires faith among its students: “You must have a belief in your own potential to learn, to grow, to make mistakes, to take chances, to be vulnerable. And, ultimately, to contribute to the common good.”

He closed by offering one final message of hope to the hundreds of students gathered on the quad: “No matter what else you take away from today, I hope that you remember how many people are behind you and beside you and who believe in you.”

Correction, Nov. 3, 2022: A previous version of this article stated that the inauguration was attended by around 1,600 community members. This number was changed to 1,200 based on an updated estimate provided by the Office of Conferences and Special Events.