Welcome to They/Themherst

For the past few weeks, the college has been celebrating 50 years of coeducation with the kind of enthusiasm typically reserved for anniversaries. There is merchandise, of course — tasteful tote bags and T-shirts emblazoned with “50 Years of CoEducation,” available at the bookstore for those looking to commemorate the moment when Amherst College discovered that women exist. One imagines future historians will mark the occasion similarly: with a simple acknowledgment, perhaps a plaque, and then a swift pivot to whatever comes next.

This raises an uncomfortable but necessary question: Why are we still doing this? So this is the goal now? What are we doing?

Coeducation, for all its fanfare, is ultimately a reform of the 1970s — a well-intentioned, incremental adjustment that reflected the limits of its time. It is, in many ways, a compromise: Rather than reimagining the institution, Amherst simply expanded it, admitting women into a structure designed quite meticulously for men. The result was not transformation so much as inclusion, a gesture that now feels, if not outdated, then at least incomplete.

Before 1975, Amherst was a men’s college, and it took that identity seriously. Generations of Amherst men were produced with remarkable consistency: equally confident, uniformly self-assured, and deeply committed to the idea that the world would, in one way or another, arrange itself around them. The institution excelled at this. It cultivated a particular kind of person with such precision that one hesitates to call it accidental. 

Women were admitted, yes, but it was into a system whose underlying assumptions remained largely intact — an architecture of tradition, prestige, and quiet self-regard that had been built long before their arrival. To celebrate coeducation, then, is to celebrate the moment Amherst widened the door without ever seriously remodeling the house. Fifty years on, it is worth asking whether that is a valid goal for an institution.

If coeducation represented an expansion without a rethinking, then the logical next step is not further expansion, but structural correction. Amherst does not need to continue adding genders into a framework that was never designed to accommodate them; it needs to abandon the framework altogether. The solution is relatively straightforward: Amherst should become the nation’s first historically nonbinary college.

A historically nonbinary Amherst would not simply welcome nonbinary identities; it would require them. Upon admission, all students would be expected to have or adopt a nonbinary identity — not as a matter of personal preference, but as a condition of intellectual seriousness. This is not coercion so much as pedagogy. Just as students are asked to think critically, write clearly, and engage rigorously, so too would they be asked to relinquish the false certainties of the binary in favor of something more capacious, more flexible, and, above all, more correct.

This is not, as some might assume, a radical break from tradition. On the contrary, it is in line with Amherst’s long-standing commitment to being just slightly ahead of its peers in ways that are legible enough to be praised. If coeducation was the necessary reform of the late 20th century, then de-binarization is simply its overdue update — a move from inclusion to coherence.

Our peer institutions have already begun circling this realization. Smith College and Mount Holyoke College, for instance, have both adapted their admissions policies to reflect a more expansive understanding of gender, carefully revising the category of “women” to include those who identify with it in ways that would have been unintelligible half a century ago. This is certainly admirable, but ultimately cautious. These institutions remain tethered to gender as a defining feature, even as they stretch its boundaries. 

This places Amherst in an awkward position. Institutions that were once defined by exclusion have, in many ways, become more conceptually flexible than those that pride themselves on openness. Smith College and Mount Holyoke College have demonstrated a willingness to reinterpret their founding categories in light of contemporary understandings of gender. Amherst, by contrast, remains committed to a model that still, at its core, organizes itself around a binary it claims to have transcended.

What, then, we might ask, would it look like for a college to do that? 

It would look like getting rid of coeducation.

After all, if gender is, as Judith Butler famously argues, a performance, it seems unnecessarily restrictive to continue admitting students on the basis of roles they may or may not be interested in performing. To identify within a binary, then, is to commit — constantly, relentlessly — to a role that one did not write and cannot meaningfully revise. Identifying as nonbinary, by contrast, offers a kind of structural freedom: a refusal to perform on command, a strategic ambiguity that resists both categorization and expectation. It is, in this sense, not just an identity, but an upgrade. And if, according to Michel Foucault, institutions are best understood as sites that produce and regulate identity, then Amherst must confront the possibility that maintaining a binary-adjacent admissions structure is not merely reflecting gender but actively enforcing it. The most responsible course of action, then, is to stop.

If Amherst is to take the next step, it must also be willing to confront a more difficult truth: not all identities are created equal. Some are provisional, and a select few — rare, conceptually elegant, and administratively efficient — are simply better. Nonbinary identity, it turns out, is one of the latter.

Rather than asking students to situate themselves within or adjacent to a binary system, the college should simply remove the expectation altogether. Gender, like a distribution requirement that no longer serves its purpose, would be phased out — archived, perhaps, in the same commemorative language now reserved for coeducation merch.

Given this, the conclusion is difficult to avoid. If nonbinary identity represents a more advanced, more critically engaged mode of being, it would be irresponsible for Amherst to treat it as merely one option among many. The college does not, after all, present outdated methodologies alongside current ones in its curriculum and invite students to choose freely between them. It sets standards.

Having eliminated gender, it will inevitably turn to the next unnecessary distinction: names. Why maintain antiquated systems that uphold difference, or  “individuality.” Then majors. Then, if all goes according to plan, the category of “student.”

In the end, Amherst will achieve what it has always quietly sought: a perfectly open curriculum inhabited by no one in particular, studying nothing in specific, with unparalleled rigor. 

We must get rid of coeducation. No more women — or men — allowed here at Amherst College. We must.

And so must we.