Coping with Campus: My New Year’s Resolution

On Friday morning, I was surprised during my walk to class by the appearance of a new sign, a large steel banner balanced between two granite pedestals that are themselves recent additions to the Orr Rink lot’s entrance (you know, by the gym and at the crosswalk you take to get to the sports field). The marker’s sudden appearance, combined with its actual appearance (that now-ubiquitous combination of soft-white capital letters on a steely matte purple here produces exactly the same set of feelings in my heart as everywhere else I see it used, that is, not a single one), compelled me to take a photograph, which I captioned “hahaha what is this” in a text to Sofia Tennent ’25.

Now, the arrival of this sign, though surprising in the moment, was in no way unexpected. I guessed a Visual Identity Toolkit-approved rendition of the words “Amherst” and “College” would have had to go above the little “est. 1821” engraved into the cuboid tombstone I walk past most days, and, after all, we at the college have seen a bit of a signage boom over the last year or so. Indeed, there are quite valid arguments to be made suggesting that improved signage, in quality and quantity, is a worthwhile investment for the college. I’ll say, at least, there’s no way I’m ever gonna miss that turn to get to the admissions office again.

Instead, I want to reflect on the aesthetic state of the entire college. This is neither something controlled by one new sign nor by any action on the part of grown-ups or students on campus. College aesthetics are a complex and non-homogenous set of decisions that I am going to try to describe just a small part of. And, in the spirit of the column, I’ll try to situate it in the student experience of living, thriving or just coping, on campus.

The aesthetic movements I’ve observed within the college that have their origins in the institution (merchandise, signage, construction, stuff like that) seem to me to have moved away from heterogeneity and internal divergence and towards integration. When I was a freshman, A.J. Hastings was still a thing, the college came out with that relatively creative collection of bicentennial merch for Homecoming, and there seemed to be no unified source of college merch at all. Except for the stuff literally sold at Schwemm’s, it seemed that people who were wearing college stuff got it all from academic departments, their grandfather ’71’s closet, or Redbubble. To a great extent, this is still true. “Amherst Math” hoodies still dominate the market, and the number one Amherst ensemble (department hoodie, elastic-cuffed joggers or stretchy denim, hiking sneaks) has remained as delightfully constant as our desexed student culture. Anyone with style on this campus does so in the face of an overwhelmingly depressing environment, where it so often feels like there is no point at all. For the rich kids, why even pull out the Issey if not a single soul will clock what it is? For everybody else, why even spend the time in the morning if you not only get to class late but also find no one outdressing your millennial professor, again?

Present Amherst, therefore, has some continuity with the past — but much has still changed. Hastings has passed from this world, and in its place stands the Amherst College Store. The store, though I have only walked past it, seems to me to be what is primarily signified by the various signs that have cropped up in the year or so since the store’s opening. The visual aesthetic of the store, rather than the built environment of campus itself, is a bit of an odd choice for the plane of content referred to by campus signage, itself newly part of the built environment. It reads to me like an import or a suturing of the store (which, downtown, sits quite separated from main campus) into campus itself, an attempt to draw the (I feel clashing) aesthetic principles of the two into some kind of new unity and thereby create a “look” actually characteristic of the entity that is called, by administrators invested in unproblematically producing such a thing, the college.

I don’t think this is in any way intentional. If it is the result of a concerted campaign, it is certainly a well-meaning initiative to update outdated or nonexistent signage and bring the (impressively coherent and professional, in my opinion) brand identity produced by the Office of Communications firmly on to campus.

However, this does not mean that the suturing together of store and campus has not happened. That is to say, if a unitary entity called the college has been produced, it has not been an unproblematic process. Think of the aesthetic touchpoints that the college has committed to with increasing intensity since the adoption of the mammoth. There are the signs, for one, and the store itself, with its AI-generated flat gray floorboards and pricey-yet-soulless merchandise, purple and white screen prints on textiles that can only be called “athletic.” But there’s more: the whole website, inside of which (Jacob Young ’25 observed) the institution seems to want us to live; the new dorm furniture (gray) straight out of The Sims; the inspired use of dark purple stained wood in mockups of the new student center; and the student center itself, all parallel lines floating by invisible support above Merrill’s skeleton.

All this feels like a new depositional layer slowly sedimenting atop strata of past institutional aesthetics: affectively neutral 2020s uniformity overtop layers of neon pleather, geometric light fixtures, city bus fabric, and the Lord only knows what from before 1995. Back then students were left to handle decor themselves, probably.

It all makes me feel just a bit like the college is succumbing to aesthetic safety. Sweatpants, matte on metal, and pleasantly serif typefaces are representative of the impulse towards retreat that characterizes our social and political impulses. We are a culture of assumption, isolating in friend groups, departmental affiliations, and sports to such a degree that it often feels unacceptable to even wave to someone you don’t really know.

Does that mean that a concerted turn away from Amherst College Store-core will solve the social issues that in some way define our student experience? Possibly not, if only because effecting such a turn seems somewhat difficult. But still: To move away from aesthetic safety, to take a few risks, is precisely to move outside of our hyper-individual shells. What would better undercut Amherst’s special brand of practical solipsism than acknowledging the humanity of another member of the college community?

We engage in risk when we do things like dress differently in the morning or begin conversation with someone we do not already know. We engage in a social world that contains entities beyond ourselves, and thereby we open ourselves to judgement, surprise, and new experience — to the special, sexy excitement engendered by taking risks. To take seriously our aesthetic choices, then, to think intentionally about what campus is like to inhabit, might lead us away from accepting and reduplicating the facelessness of brand identity. After all, this campus really is anything but uniform. Probably the most pernicious myth I’ve heard and repeated while I’ve been enrolled here holds that we are all identical in everything from academic priorities to personal wealth to political beliefs — but this could not be farther from the truth. The student body, by and large, simply does not really know who they live and learn with. Luckily (or maybe not), it seems to me that the only real hurdle stopping us from getting to know one another is that to do so might require acting a bit risky, a bit sexy.

To be clear, this is not something I am particularly good at. Many days, I’m actually particularly bad at it. Fighting that hypocrisy is my New Year’s resolution.