Academic freedom for Amherst faculty is important to the college's mission. Their students will inherit the leadership of large institutions or storied family b

Academic freedom for Amherst faculty is important to the college's mission. Their students will inherit the leadership of large institutions or storied family businesses and will need to know how to navigate these topics with poise and care. Understanding how to message to an increasingly diverse stock of labor supply is crucial to the good stewardship and continued accumulation of generational wealth. For those blissfully unaware: Amherst has a $3.8B endowment and 1745 students, or $2,177,650 per student (endowment income: $87K/student/year at a 4% withdraw). In addition to that $2M/student from the endowment, they also charge $61K/year in tuition. Amherst is a undergraduate-only teaching college, so unlike R1 these funds aren't e.g. funding a giant amount of R1 research labs or anything like that. They really do just have $90K/student per year in safe endowment withdrawal and then also charge $61K/yr in tuition. Academia has a lot of exhaustingly bullshit inter-personal stuff in general, but I have no idea how I would sit through the faculty meetings described in this post without exercising an excessive amount of academic freedom... UMass next door does infinitely more for all of these stated goals by just... not being a finishing school for the wealthy elite. (I don't have anything against Amherst per se. It's just a bit insufferable how few faculty at places like this understand that they are running finishing schools for the economic elite.)