After the faculty streamed into the Chapel dressed in bright academic regalia, honorary Master of Arts degrees were conferred upon Professor of Fine Arts Nicola Courtright, Professor of Classics Cynthia Damon and Marx, who opened his annual address by outlining his goals for the College.
He promoted increased economic diversity among the student body, urged faculty and students to consider public service and said that the College must develop new curricula to address current events. "We need your minds expanded and engaged," he told students.
Encouraging hard work and debate, Marx labeled Huntington's thesis "chauvinism cloaked in academic respectability." Huntington's recent book, "Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity" explores burgeoning Mexican immigration to the U.S. and ultimately describes dual citizenship and Anglo-Saxon cultural erosion as threats to America's national identity.
In sharp contrast to Huntington's wariness of assimilation, Marx embraced multiculturalism and the sharing of ideas, touting the liberal arts as a safeguard against treacherous reasoning that has wrought horrors upon peoples for generations. "[Huntington's] answers could not be more dangerous to the liberal arts," said Marx. "To respond is our duty and the duty of the liberal arts."
Citing the preamble to the Declaration of Independence-"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …"-Marx argued that the nation's founding fathers would have rejected Huntington's theory.
"Our founding fathers never intended for culture to define us," he said, proposing instead that they considered ideals and rules much more critical than culture.
Marx also used history to introduce the liberal arts into his argument. "We [at the College] are a product of the second Great Awakening," he said, referring to the revival movement that encouraged pragmatism and spawned institutions founded as the result of educational reform.
Dismissing the idea of a singular, set American identity, Marx said, "History never provides such immutable identity." He cited fairness and compassion as ideals upon which the nation was built. "The U.S.A. is a great idea, continually unfolding," he said.
One professor using Huntington's text in class commented on the impact of Marx's speech. Professor of History Peter Czap, who is teaching a section of National Identity, a first-year seminar that includes the text as required reading, expressed concern with the speech's potential effect on students.
"It is difficult to begin an objective discussion of the Huntington reading after the remarks of the president in the convocation, which seemed to have strongly shaped the thinking of the members in the section," Czap said.
The recipients of the conferred degrees were appreciative of the honor.
"The honor is associated with promotion from associate professor to professor for faculty members who don't already have Amherst degrees," said Professor of Classics Cynthia Damon. "It is a nice way to mark a career milestone, a gesture that doesn't generate too much fanfare."
For Courtright, her degree is in part a sign of the College's evolution. "I don't know what on earth this strange and archaic ritual conveyed to first-years, but to this 15-year-veteran of teaching at Amherst, it was, among other things, a public sign of the respect my seasoned colleagues have given me," Courtright said.
For Courtright, the award is also a symbol of the ongoing changes at the College. "Before the ceremony, I was mulling over with amazement that Amherst was still a men's college not long before I came, and with humility that I myself was taught by only a handful of women professors as an undergraduate," she said. "Without the women's movement, which was gaining velocity when I was in college, I would not have been on that stage. So this public moment had a special meaning different to me, perhaps, than to others looking on."