About this episode

In this episode, we are joined by the president of Amherst College, Michael Elliott, who has led significant institutional change efforts at different universities he’s been a part of. We unveil compelling narratives that showcase how evidence acts as a driving force in dismantling systemic barriers, rectifying injustices, and nurturing inclusivity within research institutions. From addressing discriminatory practices to championing racial equity, we spotlight the concrete impact that evidence-backed initiatives have on advancing organizations.
 

Interviewer

Kimberlyn Leary, Executive Vice President, Urban Institute

Guest

Michael Elliott, President, Amherst College

Transcript

Sarah Rosen Wartell, cohost:
Welcome to Evidence in Action, a podcast from the Urban Institute. I’m your cohost, Sarah Rosen Wartell. I have the honor of being Urban’s president.

Kimberlyn Leary, cohost:
And I’m your cohost, Kimberlyn Leary, executive vice president of the Urban Institute.

Sarah Rosen Wartell:
In this podcast, Kim and I are going to explore the role of evidence, what it is, who makes it, who can use it, who should be using it, and how it can help us to shape policy and achieve better social, economic, and environmental outcomes.

Kimberlyn Leary:
And on every episode, we’ll be joined by a brilliant guest ranging from federal policymakers, local leaders, philanthropists, social entrepreneurs, and those who meet community needs.

Sarah Rosen Wartell:
We’ll be asking them how they use facts, data, and evidence to improve lives and strengthen communities, and also about the limits of these tools in today’s complicated world.

Kimberlyn Leary:
On today’s show, I’m speaking with Michael Elliott. He’s the 20th president of Amherst College and has led significant institutional change efforts at universities. Since becoming president in 2022, Michael has led one of the most diverse liberal arts colleges in the country with a need-blind admissions policy that provides financial aid for domestic, international, and undocumented students. Michael is also a distinguished scholar of American literature and culture of the 19th and early 20th centuries and the practices of public history. And he has published widely on the history of fiction, Native American literature, and the practice of public history. He holds a BA from Amherst College and an MA and PhD in English and comparative literature from Columbia University. And before coming to Amherst, he served as dean of Emory College of Arts and Sciences. Michael spearheaded critical work to establish race and inequality as a signature research and teaching strength and made significant advances in enhancing faculty diversity. I’m so pleased to be in conversation with Michael, especially as I am a former trustee at Amherst College and also an alum. Welcome to the show, Michael.

Michael Elliott, guest:
Thank you, Kim. It’s such a pleasure to be in conversation with you.

Kimberlyn Leary:
So Michael, you were a student at Amherst and now you lead the college. Tell us about that journey. What was the most important to you about Amherst College back then, and what’s most important to you about the college as it is now?

Michael Elliott:
Well, thanks for that question. It’s true that I was a student here. I came here about 35 years ago from Arizona. And like so many students that we have on our campus now, I was not a typical Amherst College student, at least as I conceived of it. I came from Arizona, a pretty distant place. My parents went to college, but they went to branches in state universities. Nobody in our family was familiar with small liberal arts colleges. I had never even really been to New England. In fact, my very first visit to New England was to come to Amherst College for an admitted student’s weekend. So it was in some ways a very unfamiliar environment, and yet I also found it very exciting and even comfortable from the very beginning.

One of the things I love about Amherst and a college of this size is on the one hand, it’s small enough that you can understand its boundaries, get your arms around it, but it also seems to contain an almost infinite set of possibilities. It makes the world somehow much, much larger. And that’s what I loved as a student, getting to know other students, getting to know faculty, even getting to know the region and, in this small place, getting to feel like I was experiencing a world that was constantly unfolding and becoming bigger. And it’s that quality of relationship and that intellectual and personal journey of growth that is so essential to an undergraduate liberal arts education and that I want Amherst to make sure that it sustains and innovates and develops for the next generation.

Kimberlyn Leary:
So the liberal arts and the telling of stories, rich stories about people’s experience and their traditions and their history clearly make an impact on people’s lives in ways that are crucial for the health of communities and for democratic governance. Can you take us inside of that a little bit more? Why are the liberal arts so crucial for the practice of democracy and for promoting a just society?

Michael Elliott:
Thank you for that because that, in fact, is my premise, is that the liberal arts really are critical, and colleges like Amherst have a very important role to play in the future of democratic societies both in the United States and around the globe. And I think it comes back to a couple of key principles of the liberal arts. First of all, in the liberal arts, we are always learning to learn. That is, it’s not simply about a set of technical knowledge, simply about something that can be contained easily in a script or a book or a set of formulas, but we are devoted to the idea that we must develop a capacity to keep asking new questions. We also believe in the liberal arts that we are educating students to work with very different kinds of evidence, quantitative, qualitative, and to understand how that evidence works to develop new questions and to understand how questions develop over time.

Then we’re hopefully also teaching them about how to communicate what they’re learning with each other and even how to engage in the art of persuasion with one another. Democratic societies require constant negotiation, but they are about fundamentally bringing people together in society with the sense that we all have equal potential and that that potential should be realized.

Kimberlyn Leary:
Let me ask you a question about being a college president. I have to be honest, these days it does not seem that being a college president is an easy job, even though it’s also, I know, a singular opportunity that you and other leaders of universities have to shape the minds and life trajectories of students. From issues of diversity and inclusion and free speech and community, the role of alumni, all these things have been in the news quite recently. Can you share with us some of the pressures that are on college leaders today? Are they different from in the past? And what are the new opportunities that you have to shape public dialogues as a college president?

Michael Elliott:
Well, that’s a question, as you can imagine, it’s been very much on my mind, and we’re recording this in a week when college presidents are very much in the news and not necessarily in a positive way. And I’ve actually been reflecting on that question a great deal. Is this something that is old and recurring, or is this actually something new, this pressure that college presidents are facing? And I think the answer, and this is a classic liberal arts answer, is a bit of both. For at least a century, colleges and universities in the United States have been the subject of scrutiny from the larger society. And in part that’s because colleges are about the future, and they’re about the future of our leadership and our professional life, and so a lot of attention is paid to what goes on a college campus as a way of our larger society understanding and addressing and working out its set of conflicts and anxieties that are made more visible on a college campus.

We like to work on complex matters, we like to think about ambiguity, we like to think about context, and to have room for lots of nuanced discussion. And that’s our forte. And actually that’s one of the reasons I think colleges and universities have been so important in terms of educating Americans to lead the 20th century and hopefully to lead the 21st, as well as to produce new and important research that advances society in every way. But the current media and social media environment really cuts against that. And so I think that’s a big part of the pressure that we’re feeling. It’s also not lost on me that this pressure is occurring at a moment when our leading colleges and universities really have made a commitment to having a diverse set of leaders, faculty, and students.

Kimberlyn Leary:
So it sounds like you’re saying, Michael, that a college, optimally, really is a container for the complexities of the present that we will need to really work through as we think about the future and to really equip the undergraduate students at Amherst and graduate students elsewhere in order to be able to take on that complexity when they enter into public life and into their careers.

Michael Elliott:
Absolutely. That’s very well said. I’m going to crib that language from you in some of my upcoming alumni appearances, but that is absolutely right. We’re working through the present and hopefully looking to the past with an eye toward preparing our students to be leaders in the future. And especially highly selective colleges like Amherst, we are preparing students to be leaders. Not necessarily all of them will go on to become CEOs or elected leaders, but leaders in every facet of society, including their personal lives. And that’s a goal that we should own and constantly reflect upon.

Kimberlyn Leary:
I’d like to ask you about one kind of public history that’s been a part of your career, and that’s public history and your work on Native American literature. Too often the perspective of Native American communities just simply aren’t recognized in our public dialogues, or if they are, they too, their histories, are flattened. How has your work in particular on Native American literature shaped what you understand history to mean or really what it should mean for all of us?

Michael Elliott:
Thank you for taking me back to my scholarly career. To me, if I go back earlier, I became interested in Native American literature because of the power of the stories that were being told there, as well as the really interesting history of how those stories were often very hard to hear at certain moments in American life. And then at some point, I became interested in how that kind of storytelling was also present in public spaces, so monuments, memorials, I even spent some time talking to reenactors. And in the course of that, I learned a tremendous amount, but one is that Native American expression, whether it’s in literature or through public works, is often about centering us in a place and reminding us of the complex histories of those places. And unfortunately because of the history of this landscape, the ways that those histories are often not visible and not easily available.

And to me, recovering those stories and bringing them into the present, as well as connecting them to the future of our society and recognizing the ongoing presence of tribal peoples in the United States, Indigenous peoples in the United States is incredibly powerful, and it makes the world much richer. And it’s interesting to me that there are some people for when they encounter this kind of recovery or asked to think about these kinds of histories. In fact, I’ll say white people, sometimes they experience this as an exercise in feeling guilty. And for me, that’s never been the point, nor do I actually think it is for Indigenous storytellers. Instead, it’s about acknowledging and making the world more rich and more complicated, and opening up the possibility that we can recognize each other in new ways. And that kind of recognition for me is at the heart of what it means to live in a democratic society. And so the literature, the public history, those are means of achieving that kind of acknowledgement and that kind of understanding of one another that I think just makes being an American more exciting.

Kimberlyn Leary:
So let me take you to the present at Amherst College, which, as a graduate of the college, I am so proud of the fact that Amherst is one of the most diverse liberal arts colleges in this country and in the world, quite frankly, with 48 percent of students identifying as students of color and 56 percent of Amherst students receiving financial aid last year—I hope those numbers are approximately right.

Michael Elliott:
They are.

Kimberlyn Leary:
Tell us, what impact have you experienced that this diverse student body has had on the college’s culture and the college’s experience of the public present?

Michael Elliott:
Yeah, it’s great, and coming back after having been away for several decades has really brought some of those changes into relief. We really do have people coming from all over the world. One of the things that’s also part of the stories that we now have, about 12 percent of our students are international. And you mentioned earlier we’re one of the few institutions that’s able to offer financial aid for international students. And so that means our international student population also comes from a much broader set of countries than many other colleges and universities. And you put that all together, and it makes for a really exciting campus experience. One of the things I’ve heard from faculty is that it means that they can have conversations in their classrooms that make them better teachers and offers them the opportunity to help students learn from one another in different ways.

It also creates, and I think we should be honest about this, a different set of challenges for a campus like this. There are fewer cultural references or social experiences that all of our students have in common. For most of our students, this will be the most diverse community that they have ever lived in, and for some of them, it probably will be the most diverse community they ever will live in. And there are challenges that go along with that in terms of how you negotiate your everyday life: What’s your expectation of what kind of meals do you have, what kind of music are you playing, how do you talk about certain subjects together? And, again, in a culture in which we’re very quick to judge one another, we have to help students have those dialogues with one another because it should be a place where they can learn from the different perspectives that they bring.

And then I think, I’ve been reflecting a lot, especially you mentioned the number of students that we have on financial aid, about one in five students, slightly more than that, are Pell grant recipients, which means that they are in our lower income band. And then, of course, we also have students who come from significant wealth, and to be able to afford an Amherst education without financial aid requires significant financial resources. And that class divide is something else that our students have to negotiate. Now, we have done certain things on our campus to try to reduce barriers to that kind of interaction. We’ve had to learn about that over time.

For instance, we now keep the residential halls open during breaks because we know that not every student can go home, we make sure that nearly every campus activity has financial support for all. But these are young people who are learning about the world for the first time, and it’s often a revelation to them to get to know people who have very different expectations of the world because of their family’s wealth or income. And that goes both ways, and it actually can be an exciting thing to listen to, overhear among students, but it can also be painful sometimes. If we’re thinking about preparing future leaders, that roughness is actually part of the learning process.

Kimberlyn Leary:
Michael, as you know, one of the hats I wear is also a teacher, professor.

Michael Elliott:
I know.

Kimberlyn Leary:
And when I’m teaching courses on teams, there’s a large literature that says that diverse teams can produce very innovative results, but there has to be, what Amy Edmondson has called, psychological safety in order for that innovation to flourish. As we face this world where systemic barriers and historical injustices and inclusivity and the challenges of that are on so many people’s minds, what’s the role of evidence in being a driving force in being able to move us forward?

Michael Elliott:
Evidence has to be the bedrock of that work. And as you were saying in your question, different kinds of evidence. Quantitative evidence can be enormously helpful but very rarely tells the full story. Qualitative evidence can be extraordinarily important, as I was explaining earlier, my interest in storytelling, but also can become anecdotal if one isn’t too careful. A great liberal arts education should teach us to use evidence, question the evidence, and then go back and think about new ways of collecting more evidence.

Kimberlyn Leary:
Many Amherst students go on to do quite extraordinary things, and we’ve been thrilled at the Urban Institute to host Amherst students in the spring as part of their treks, those that are interested in public policy and a research and economic policy think tank as we are, at this moment in time, as Amherst students are thinking about their careers or after they’ve graduated and looking back on their careers, what advice or recommendations would you have about the way in which too often evidence itself gets politicized, or even the very hallmarks of an Amherst education get put into a political frame that makes complexity, say, a bad word?

Michael Elliott:
Yeah, complexity, ambiguity, context, all those things that I was talking about before, those are the hallmarks of an Amherst education, and unfortunately, one of the trademarks of this current political moment is that those get completely eviscerated. We’re looking for easy answers and sound bites to difficult questions. And so the advice that I would give to students and do give to students when they ask for advice, they don’t always listen, but they do ask for advice, is first of all, you have to have integrity in what you’re doing. And so you don’t ever want to sacrifice that integrity, your own understanding of the evidence and the problems and the solutions, for an easy win in terms of what you think people want to hear. And then the other thing that I really advise people, and I advise them on this on campus as well, is to seek opportunities to expand the dialogue, try not to get sucked into playing the lowest common denominator game of just shouting back and forth.

And they say that, very rarely at this point, actually physically shouting, it’s more on social media or on email. Or I go back to conversation. My colleague here, Martha Umphrey, who you may know, is a terrific faculty member who taught a course last semester on the politics of free speech. I asked her a question about, what’s advice she gives to students when they encounter an opinion that they find troubling? And she said, “I tell them, ‘Go ask lots of questions: Why’d you say that? How’d you reach that conclusion? What’s behind that?’ And then, as you draw somebody out, then you can start to say, “Well, here’s why I’m thinking about it very differently, and here’s why I think what you said might actually be not only wrong, but perhaps, in some cases, even harmful.” With all of the means of communication that are at our disposal, we’ve sometimes turned away from the richer forms of communication to something that is much poorer, and that does not serve our society very well.

Kimberlyn Leary:
So the art of using evidence well, it sounds like, includes the art of being able to ask good questions, complex questions, and even questions that exist in a particular context.

Michael Elliott:
Absolutely. In the liberal arts, we like to joke, or not even joke, I think it’s the truth, that a good question is sometimes more important than a good answer. I believe that strongly.

Kimberlyn Leary:
Michael, let me ask you a final question, if I may, and let’s go back to your own work as a scholar. We love to end the podcast with a question about, what we call, evidence in action. So as a scholar, as someone who works in the area of public history, and in a moment as we’ve been discussing, where history is very much contested, is there an example from your own scholarship of where high-quality evidence informed a choice you made as a researcher or as a scholar?

Michael Elliott:
As you can imagine, I love any question that involves getting me back to my nerd roots. I am fundamentally a nerd and a document nerd, and so the most pleasurable scholarly experiences that I’ve often had have been sitting down with documents that I feel like tell a story that has maybe not been properly understood or fully put into context. And for me, as a student of public history, some of the most interesting archives that I’ve come across have been about how acts of historical remembrance have evolved over time. For instance, I became really interested in a reenactment, actually a pair of reenactments, that are staged in Montana around the anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. And at some point I found, I didn’t discover myself, but somebody told me where I could get to an archive of all the materials that had gone into the development of those reenactments and how they had changed over time, and the different scripts and letters and arrangements that were made, and I love that.

And it made me realize that there really was a richer story to tell here, and that I, as a scholar, wanted to pursue that. And it’s funny, when I now do work here as president, I often find myself looking for those same archives. For instance, I’ve been reading recently some of the archives that we have about debates among Amherst faculty around the curriculum that took place at different points of time, and what were their disagreements, how did they reach the consensus that they did? I love evidence that records debate and dialogue, and it helps understand why a decision was made, including the paths not taken, and that’s something that I think carries over from my scholarly to my administrative.

Kimberlyn Leary:
Well, Michael, as a fellow Mammoth, I am delighted to be in conversation with you and to hear about Amherst as you experienced it when you were a student, very similar to my experience, but also through this very important vantage point of being an institutional leader at a very important moment in time. And we thank you so much for being on the show.

Michael Elliott:
Well, thank you so much, this has been such a pleasure, especially to do this with a fellow Mammoth, something that I admire very, very much, and I’m glad to make a small contribution to.

Kimberlyn Leary:
Thank you, Michael. Join us next time on Evidence in Action as we have conversations about important ways that drive change with our talented and captivating guests. And if you would like to learn more about us, go to our website at urban.org. You can also follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you listen to your podcasts. This has been Evidence in Action, created by the Urban Institute and Pod People. I’m your cohost, Kim Leary. Thank you.