Dr. Anthony Fauci: A STEM Figure at LitFest

Johnson Chapel wasn’t designed for spectators. The seats are uncomfortable — par for the course with chapels in general — and many have totally obstructed views of the stage, some by columns, some by virtue of their elevation. Upper-level seats, which only offer visual access to their own floor, are the least desirable in the venue. Even during the most sold-out gatherings, they are doomed to vacancy.

These were my thoughts when I showed up last to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s LitFest talk and was condemned to the worst seats in the house: the upper-level pews without any line of sight to the man himself. Before he even began, I considered myself a failed journalist — one who was assigned to report on an event and yet unable to do so accurately because of his own incompetence. But when the discussion began, my disappointment melted away; my nosebleed pew clotted. I was suddenly transported to my 2020 bedroom, my Covid fever raging, and a small man on T.V. telling me why schools were closing. Just as FDR’s voice swept through American radios through the Great Depression, his upper-class WASPy-Dutchess County accent dispensing consoling New Deal policy justifications and fatherly words of comfort, Fauci’s middle-class Italian-American Brooklyn brogue seeped into the microscopic wires of American transistors in 2020, offering a rhetorical vaccination against the twin epidemics of Covid and viral stupidity. Front row be damned, we invited the man for his voice above all else.

So what is Fauci’s voice to Amherst College? What does his continued presence do for the American public?

To the first question, we might begin by wondering what a former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has to do with literature. The answer is simple: nothing. Fauci is in no way literary. Whereas Percival Everett and Teju Cole are invited to the College as representatives of their books, Fauci’s “On Call” is merely an excuse to invite a celebrity. An important celebrity, perhaps, but certainly not a literary one.

The argument could be made that Amherst’s decision, or more specifically, The Common’s decision to invite a non-literary figure to headline a literary festival represents a larger turning away from the humanities — a concession to the academy’s budgetary preference for STEM over English. There might have been more room for this argument had the crowd for Fauci’s talk not been so totally engaged with the presentation. While the upper-level pew made it impossible for me to see Fauci, I was uniquely positioned to watch the crowd’s faces. While discussions of the creative process and inspiration for writing led some in both Everett and Cole’s audiences to grow incrementally restless and impatient, nobody budged for Fauci.

And it’s not as if the crowd’s composition was radically different for the different speakers. The general reaction from English and computer science majors alike was that Fauci’s talk was the most engaging of LitFest. I consider Everett to be one of the most important writers alive, and I had the opportunity to speak with him. I shook the man’s hand, he told me to watch “The Searchers,” and I asked him not to adapt “James” into a movie; however, even this relatively intimate moment hardly matched what Fauci did to his crowd.

As Fauci rattled off seemingly banal facts about his childhood, I could see a quiet satisfaction wash over the eyes of the audience. Smiles and laughter are generally reserved for literature — Cord Jefferson’s best remark was his observation that laughter and absurdity were, in fact, logical consequences of and rigorous tools to deconstruct the absurdity of race in America — but the funniest presentation by far came from this scientist. Laughter burst forth from the crowd not as if they were witnessing a rehearsed joke, as was the case for the previous two presentations, but as if Fauci was personally reaching out and telling every person a private, scandalous secret. Everett and Cole’s work was articulated in terms of the world abstracted; their humor derived from their ability to step back and observe absurdity through the fractals of literary experiments. Where does Fauci’s humor come from? As he said, his life has been dedicated to the proper accumulation and dissemination of “data, evidence, and facts.” If we laugh with him, we laugh at the world that sees such a mission as absurd in itself; this world is the one that sends Fauci death threats.

In a way, I’ve hopefully already begun to answer the question of what Fauci is to the American public. One thing is for sure about his existence: It’s largely obsolete. As Cullen Murphy ’74, the panel host, pointed out, the primary memory of Fauci for the American people is his presence beside and in front of President Donald Trump at the White House’s 2020 press briefings. This was a spectacle unique in American history: an official of the federal government telling the American people that his boss, the president of the United States, who stood right behind him, was lying to their faces. Fauci stressed just how difficult this decision was for him to make after a lifetime of service to federal authority. He explained his strategic decision to only call out the president for saying Covid would “go away like magic” or that hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment when forced by the media.

None of this was new information for the audience at Johnson Chapel. Even the observations that Murphy presented as most surprising — like Fauci’s explanation of the United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a policy of the second Bush administration that has saved upwards of 25 million lives and is now facing drastic cuts tantamount to murder — were nothing revolutionary if one knows a bit about U.S. foreign policy. If Fauci’s recollections of the AIDS epidemic were interesting at all, they were interesting as a tale of regret from a public official with little incentive to publicly admit wrongdoing, but Fauci would never think of himself as a hero for this vulnerability. Even the story of Fauci’s interactions with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. didn’t offer much beyond what everyone already knew: Kennedy is deranged. If we felt reassured listening to such common sense, then we were reassured by nostalgia for a half-decade ago when there were still officials in government who were immune to the spell of Trump’s influence. If there are any Faucis in Washington, they’re currently unknown and likely soon to go.

For such a political figure, this section of the presentation was, at most, hesitatingly political. Throughout the entire presentation, the speakers only explicitly said “Trump” twice, and one of those mentions was in the context of referring to Trump’s history of never having thrown out the first pitch of a baseball game. Fauci’s time in the American spotlight had already ended; he had no positions for which he might advocate, and if he did, his advocacy would do little to advance those positions. So the mystery stands: Why was Fauci’s presentation such a success? Why did he not only receive a standing ovation, which seems to be the standard Amherst response to LitFest presentations, but literal whoops and hollers?

Perhaps the answer can be found in Fauci’s response to a question from my friend Allison Rhea ’26 about his first pitch on Opening Day of the 2020 MLB season. Fauci threw this pitch so wildly away off the plate and in the dirt that what should’ve been a strike turned into more of a ground ball to the backstop. The question was about something trivial, obviously, but my contention is that the content of the presentation was generally trivial, so Allison’s question and Fauci’s decision to respond to the question were both wise. The content didn’t matter in Johnson Chapel. From my seat above, I didn’t even need to see Fauci to know what mattered: It was his voice.

Fauci laughed about the baseball incident. The sound of his chest exhaled in quick pulses and rattled through the room like that of a grandfather telling an old joke. He called it one of the most embarrassing moments of his life of public service; when he said “embarrassing,” his voice exploited the effaced distinction that the Italian accent makes between the “a” in “apple” and the “a” in “father,” shooting the enunciated gap and lingering for a microsecond longer than we might expect: “emBARrassing.” He said he had thrown out his arm on the mound while practicing in his childhood neighborhood of Bensonhurst before he walked into frame on national television; for a moment, we were all picturing the tiny old man tossing with his grandson on a sandy lot in 2020 Brooklyn, themselves bonding as Fauci must have done with his father in the same neighborhood when he was a child in the Great Depression, though this time through the polypropylene weaving of our CDC-recommended common visage.

Maybe Fauci wouldn’t be as effective had the previous conversations taken better advantage of the literary lineup. It’s my opinion that writers are good at writing, and to ask them to speak off the dome about their creative process is boring and beside the point. Future LitFests might benefit from asking for prepared speeches from their authors and poets rather than sloppy ramblings. Whereas Cole and Everett excel as writers and not as improvisers, Fauci’s experience on every late night show made the format of a loosely structured conversation enjoyable. If LitFest is meant to be about literature, then, “The Common” should raise the bar for its presenters and demand that writers flex their stuff. If LitFest is to stay literary and attempt to prove that rationality and sense are not exclusive to science and technology, then they must format the event for artists and not chatter about art.

Amherst invited a sensible little man to Johnson Chapel to speak plainly to an audience that wanted nothing more than plain speech. Our excitement for his voice was palpable but moderately nostalgic. A festival of literature mustn’t continue to look to the political past for perspective on the present. Hopefully, we can get with the times, or simply realize that 2020 came centuries before 2025.