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Elliott Outlines Priorities at State of College
Leo Kamin ’25 Managing News Editor
College President Michael Elliott and the Association of Amherst Students (AAS) President Sirus Wheaton ’23 delivered “State of the College” addresses on Sunday, April 2.
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Though both began their roles in the fall of 2022, Wheaton, who is reaching the end of his one-year term, reflected on the past, while Elliott, who has only just begun his tenure, looked toward the future. Wheaton reflected on his impeachment last semester and his takeaways from his time as president more generally. Elliott gave his assessment of the biggest issues facing the college, and outlined,
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Speaker Traces Difficulties of Defining Antisemitism
Julia Gentin ’26 Senior Staff Writer
Kenneth S. Stern, a lawyer and expert on hatred and antisemitism, gave a talk titled “Antisemitism and Binary Thinking: Campus Culture and the Future of Democracy,” at the college on Wednesday, March 29.
in broad strokes, his priorities going forward.
Wheaton structured his speech around a claim that last semester's impeachment trial — in which AAS Vice President Ankit Sayed ’24 unsuccessfully tried to remove Wheaton — “saved senate” by energizing senators and shining light on the AAS’ issues.
Elliott built his address around the “three umbrellas” of issues that he would focus on across the next few years: making Amherst a better place to work, fostering a greater sense of belonging among the student body, and ensuring that the college “owns its civic responsibility.”
The event, which was held in Johnson Chapel for the first time in a number of years, was not widely promoted, so the two presidents spoke to a sparse crowd that included just a handful of non-senators. Elliott said that he hoped that the State of College would see greater turnout in the future.
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Wheaton, who rose first, conceded that his claim that his impeachment had been good for the AAS was “the hot take,” but he nevertheless argued that the impeachment improved the AAS in four ways: by focusing the student body’s attention on the senate and therefore increasing transparency; by highlighting the problem of “senator complacency”; by forcing senators to affirmatively “stand up for what they believed”; and by ensuring
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that the senate “learned way more than any other senate ever has,” in the process of consulting the AAS bylaws to determine out how to conduct an impeachment trial.
Wheaton then went on to detail a number of projects that he and various senators have engaged in across the past year. He pointed to his work connecting the college community to town of Amherst’s reparations efforts, to the creation of a newsletter and Instagram page to keep students informed about the AAS’ proceedings, to the establishment of a new committee bringing together affinity group leaders to improve inter-group
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Stern, director of Bard College’s Center for the Study of Hate, and author of “The Conflict over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate,” has argued before the Supreme Court and acted as lead director of what is now the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) International Working Definition of Antisemitism. During the talk, Stern argued that the definition has been used, counter to his intention, to unfairly suppress anti-Israel political speech.
Stern also discussed the relationship between antisemitism and hate in general, the danger of using a single definition for antisemitism, and the conspiratorial thinking that is present in manifestations of antisemitism.
Ahead of the talk, President Michael Elliott sent out an email to all students, faculty, and staff encouraging attendance.
“We must not underestimate the persistent problem of antisemitism and its profound impacts on our world,” Elliott wrote.
At the talk, Stern said antisemi-
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