W. S. Tyler (1810–1897)

Simple pleasures. Lit windows. How celebrate years of petitioning the Massachusetts General Court for a Charter, rejected three times and only granted with the Legislature’s peculiar right, with combined houses voting, to appoint vacant trustees among the 17 required. (In 1874 the General Court ceded this unique requirement back to the alumni of the College, where remains.) Celebrate by Illumination! Candles in all the college windows, the hotel, and the houses in town. Feb 21, 1825. 194th Anniversary.
By 1836, Amherst College had more students, 259, than Harvard, fewer only than Yale. How did it gain so many? “This rapid and extraordinary growth of the college…[ largely caused by] the violent opposition it encountered.” “Institutions almost always flourish under persecution whether apparent or real”(63). Amherst opposed the un-orthodoxy of Cambridge, the growing Unitarianism of the Boston sophisticates; in fact, Amherst was evangelical, with frank missionary intentions, which were realized in a martyr. On hearing of their son’s martyrdom, his parents lamented his cannibal killers, “The poor Batak!” This amused my witty correspondent, Professor Theodore Baird, who added, “Not Poor Henry?” Baird observed how (contrary to Baptist and Catholic colleges) this martyrdom was ignored, “almost suppressed” in college history.
Besides theology and Biblical languages, Hebrew as well as the entrance-required Greek and Latin, and supplemental “Oriental Languages (Aramaic? Persian?), Amherst College featured the sciences, “Natural Philosophy.” In fact, Fourth Floor North College, where I lived three years, housed at one end the 30’ non-partitioned room which served as a chapel and a lecture-hall, “where lectures on the physical sciences followed morning and evening devotions, thus uniting learning and religion according to the original design of the institution, but where the worship was sometimes disturbed by too free a mixture of acids and gases”(29).
Amherst students in those early days were free from distractions.“They came here to study, and they had nothing else to do”(35). Excepting the weekly film, I experienced the same over a century later, 1960’s, when the “social gatherings” at AmColl were in the new Frost Library, or at the cafeteria. Tuition and fees were modest, $150 more than the state university in town. Amenities, likewise modest. Thus I do not understand the enormous charges now levied on students, except as the demands of the haute bourgeois. Not sure students even take out books—they don’t at many colleges which boast of no need for ‘em with digital and blinding screens.… (más)