The Anguish of Amherst College Students

In my two years here at Amherst, I have come to know a feeling of anguish that persists within the student body; I am no exception. I am often told of the suffocating nature of the school, whether it’s the isolation felt as a result of cliques or the repetitive nature of the average week of a college student encapsulated by a work hard, play hard mentality. To make sense of these things I’m feeling, I talked to a few friends and identified a few factors that undermine our community: vocational approach, social division, and the need to make the most of our youths.

“It teaches you to think.” If you’re like me, this phrase has been uttered, often defensively, to justify the education I am receiving here. This response is characteristic of liberal arts students. This type of education focuses on interdisciplinary learning, critical thinking, effective communication, and civic awareness. Thus, a liberal arts degree suggests that you are a thinker, a person who can connect the stars and uncover constellations. It does not bother with vocational training. At least, this is what it claims. I spoke with Oscar Hernandez ’27, who has observed the driving force of the average Amherst student.

Oscar: There are a lot of cliques on campus. While you may say there is comradery in these spaces, there tends not to be a lot of intermingling between these groups.

JP: What groups are you referring to?

Oscar: Athletes, affinity groups … and other general student cliques. But I think that at the end of the day, everybody is still their own person, in the sense that we are all just here to get a job one day.

JP: So you would say that we aren’t unified by just being Amherst College students but that comradery exists in cliques rather than the whole?

Oscar: Yes, and when it comes to unity here, we are united by a division.

Oscar’s words lingered in my mind: “united by a division.” They resonated with my own campus life experience, where connection feels fragmented and transient. This sense of detachment isn’t unique to Amherst; it’s baked into the very fabric of higher education.

Walter Benjamin, in his “Life of Students,” understood this alienation long before we experienced it. He explains that the college is first and foremost, a bourgeois institution. College is a means to an end, a transitory stage to acquire a job. One need not look further than the Loeb Center for evidence. I believe that the placement of this career center is much more sinister than it seems to be. If one is familiar with where it is placed, it looms over the college. Its presence is a declaration of the student’s purpose: to get a job. All that you learn is in service of making you a well-rounded employee rather than a citizen or a leader. Its presence is an indicator of what your average Amherst student is like: a person in tension between practicality and learning. Between material and spiritual. Everything must have a tangibility; if it does not, then it is useless.

There is immense pressure upon the student to extrapolate a “skill” from each class. But where does this leave the community of students? Benjamin would say that emphasis on the tangible over the immaterial is what leaves the spiritual value of the community in shambles. Everyone is goal-oriented toward an end outside of college rather than treating it as a pure means. Every student is focused on their own advancement rather than on their community. We often leave each other behind; we leave each other to fend for ourselves. To be a student is to be alienated.

In response to this, one may point out the comradery that exists with athletes or other groups like the Black Student Union. This is something I understand as someone who has had experience with both. However, I would say that this is just a different kind of splinter in college life. If social divisions define campus life, then where is the universal comradery? I posed this question to Kevin Gutierrez ’25 who shared his observations on the barriers to connection.

Kevin: I don’t think there is much comradery at all. We’re really just a bunch of cliques that coexist with each other. It’s just how it is over here. People will stay with their toxic friend groups, or have their falling outs, and then just isolate themselves, ya know? People here, once they have their clique, struggle to make more friends.

JP: What do you say of these cliques? Why is it that people have such a hard time making friends outside of them? Would you say people willingly stay in cliques, or is it a kind of necessity?

Kevin: It’s a combination of things. For one, it’s about comfort. You already got ya homies already, and that’s it; you don’t gotta think about it too much. I mean, if you wanna talk about cliques, look no further than your student-athletes, ya know? If you have this pre-ordained group that you already have more in common with than any of the other students, then you’re prolly gonna end up staying with that group even if they are crappy people. I mean, think about it, all the broke people stay together, all the Black people stay together, all the Latinos stay together, all the Asians stay together — for the most part. You do have your multi-racial friend groups here and there, or there may be one token in each group, but that’s just how it is. People stay in the cliques mainly stationed around their identity cause you know you have more in common with these people, and the more you spend time with them, the less you want to leave them — you already have that sunk cost.

Kevin’s insights reveal how Amherst’s social dynamics perpetuate division, not necessarily out of hostility but out of habit. While Amherst fosters a diverse environment, it still struggles to cultivate meaningful cross-group interaction. We share the same spaces but are more distant than ever.

What makes these cliques so fascinating is that they form a sort of in-crowd, out-crowd mentality. There is a high barrier to entry into these cliques. Generally, I’d say that this high barrier is the managing of characteristics that fit the in-group beyond the common denominator of simply being an Amherst student. If you fit into an in-group, that’s who you’re with. Look no further than the division between athletes and regular students. This division is so clear-cut that there is a word to distinguish between the in-group (athletes) and the out-group (students): NARP (non-athletic, regular person).

Continuing down this notion of the in-group, out-group mentality, this out-group has come to be understood as “shadow-Amherst.” Shadow-Amherst is made up of the people who have failed to find their cliques. As someone who has been a part of, and arguably is still in, shadow-Amherst, isolation is the theme of the Amherst College experience. Once someone is in this out-group, it is hard to find one’s way out of it. This often leads to one just wallowing away in cultural obscurity within the college space.

Social life at Amherst isn’t just affected by the vocational training of the college. There is also the matter of how the awareness of being in this stage within our lives affects the way we relate to each other. For Benjamin, the transitory stage of college (the bridge between childhood and adulthood) places pressure on the students to enjoy their youth while they have it. Our youth is something to be cherished. It’s the sand that slowly escapes through the creases in your hand; you can’t hold onto it forever. This is our fate; we can’t escape it.

To understand this concept, I want to look at the party culture at Amherst College. There is a work hard, play hard mentality. You slave away in sleepless nights reading a 70-page paper on sociology, philosophy, or maybe both. All of this is to be rewarded with a night of being with friends (if you have any) as a clash of hectic music serenades the scene. You walk into a place like Hitch and are immediately greeted with a crowd of intermingling, drunk, and belligerent college students passing the time by playing the who can talk the loudest game. They are all separated into groups — a large selection of parallel kickbacks. To your left, you can find a decently large room made small by the compacted students screaming at each other as they perform their best rendition of Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen” or a 2010 song by some generic pop one-hit wonder. You enter, and the room is hot, the floors are sticky as people’s shoes cement the booze onto the wooden floors, creating a scent that is a mix of Heineken, Titos, Pink Whitney, and youthful ignorance. It then ends, and everyone goes their separate ways, often to Antonio’s Pizza to do more drunk intermingling. Then, the day after comes, your head is pounding, the lights are too bright, and you need water. This is the hangover. You take about a day to recover, and then Sunday comes. You catch up on all the work you forgot to do. It’s a busy day. Come Monday, the week begins, and you do it all over again. Work hard, play hard, work hard, play hard. Like clockwork.

There is something somber that lies at the core of this way of life. Subconsciously, I think we recognize that these years are the ones when we are free. Freedom from work, freedom from real-world responsibilities. Here, we can run wild in a way that won’t be available to us after graduation — not in the same way. Every party, then, fulfills a need as much as a want: an escape.  However, the whole process reveals itself to be a rather monotonous endeavor. It’s a Sisyphean way of life. We party to escape, but we only reinforce the cycle. We may gain a sense of euphoria, but once it’s gone, you’re left with another week and then another party. But then again, what are college students without their parties? Who is Sisyphus without his boulder?

To counteract this way of life, Benjamin states, the students need to gather around the university and transform it as an end in and of itself. Here, ideas would be untethered from the bourgeoisie lifestyle and the university would create methodologies that would be beneficial for society. This would be a spiritual revolution where the will of the student would fully flourish — where cliques would be a thing of the past. It would be a moment where college isn’t centered around simply enjoying our youth but truly engaging with this moment in time as a stepping stone in this journey we call life.

Yet, this is a pipe dream. This type of movement requires changes that go well beyond what the student can do. It requires a fundamental change of what it means to be human. The fact of the matter is that as long as students grow up in a bourgeois world, our constitutions simply won’t allow us to see college as anything more than the gateway into the world constituted by the ruling class — as a place where youth is frozen in time and decays once that degree is given at Commencement. However, this does not mean that we still shouldn’t try. We must unite in our struggle and attempt to reinvigorate the will of the student. There needs to be a first step taken, a sacrifice needed to make student life a better place that wouldn’t just affect students but the world. This requires doing the small things: checking in on each other, cracking a smile when you see someone passing you, making the classroom a true place of collaboration rather than a place where you receive a grade. If we don’t so much as try, then I fear we will be allowing ourselves to wallow away in our anguish and watch as we enter the world we so fear — maintaining this fate for future students. As immense as the grain may be, we must nonetheless go against it.

There is a real anguish that lies at the heart of the Amherst College experience. I can remember sitting on top of Memorial Hill as a visitor to Amherst. There was a certain vigor in my soul that I can no longer find. I remember when I laid my eyes on the mountains, they beckoned me to the college on the hill. Yet now that I am here, I no longer hear that beckoning call. Do you?