So I have a close friend who attends an East Coast liberal-arts college
of very similar academic caliber and prestige to Amherst–I’ll refer to it
as Bleecker College. Because he lives down here in DC, I’ve had the
opportunity to meet a few of his friends from Bleecker. When the subject has
come up that I go to Amherst, the reaction is universally identical. Their
eyes bug out, and their eyebrows make a beeline for their hairline. Their
shoulders thrust backwards as if I’d reached out and pushed them, and their
voices hit near-falsetto tones: “Really?! You go to AMHERST? WOW!” From that
point on in the conversation, I am treated differently. The level of respect
I receive rises–everything I say is treated as if the fact that I go to
Amherst gives it an extra level of imprimatur. The first time it happened, I
was able to dismiss it as just the person who did it being a douchebag. But
then it kept happening. I can’t help but think that students at Bleecker are
huge prestige whores. Other comments they have made that have led me to this
conclusion include the following:

1. About a pre-frosh from the mid-west who eventually decided to attend
Calvin College, a christian school close to home: “I can’t believe he chose
Calvin over us. He would have loved Bleecker!” I responded, “I don’t know, I
can understand wanting to go to college closer to home.” To which this
Bleecker student responded, “Yeah, but why would anyone choose Calvin over
Bleecker?”

2. On choosing to apply to Bleecker early over Yale: “You know, sometimes I
wish I had a yale.edu email address, just because I think people would
respect it more. Don’t you?” I responded, “Well, I think an amherst.edu or a
bleecker.edu email address is still quite impressive. Besides, would you
want to go to school in New Haven?” He responded, “I think we can get back
at Yale by all going to grad school at Harvard.”

The fact that I’m so taken aback by this prestige-whoredom, I think, says a
lot about institutional values at Amherst. I think from Tony Marx on down,
there’s a very strong sense that as much as we’re all really intelligent at
Amherst, we also had a strong element of privilege or good fortune that has
separated us from other intelligent people who don’t have the opportunity to
go to Amherst and who don’t have the educational opportunities we do as a
result. Granted, there is a vocal minority who oppose this view on the
Jolt/Confessional/etc, but I think that the majority of Amherst students
accept that gaining admission to Amherst or a similar institution isn’t just
about one’s brainpower. The corollary to that is not to judge other people
based on where they go to school (or if they go to school at all.) Our
tendency to stereotype UMass/Hampshire students notwithstanding, I think the
majority of Amherst students buy into this. I’ve come to appreciate this
value a lot more in recent weeks.

Also, I don’t think that Amherst is the only school that avoids
prestige-whoredom. I’ve been meeting people this summer who go to places
like Princeton, Vassar, Davidson, Holy Cross, UVA, Brandeis, CSU-Chico,
Bethel College, Franklin College–in other words, a really diverse group of
schools–and none of them react the same way to finding out that I go to
Amherst. Even the ones that have heard of Amherst, and know that it’s a very
good school academically, still react in a much more subdued way. They don’t
change the way they act towards me because they know I go to Amherst. I
prefer it that way.