
Source: Amherst College Bound Memorabilia, vol. 67, no. 8.
For much of its history, Amherst College was a much smaller place than it is today. Enrollment 100 years ago was just 420 young men; today it is over 1,800 and about evenly divided between males and females. (The student body didn’t expand to anywhere close to its current size until the swell of post-World War II returning soldiers and their subsequent baby-boom offspring made the growth seem inevitable.)
So 19th and early 20th century Amherst was a much quieter place, more intimate — and, one might venture to suppose, more oppressive for that reason. Among the students there was virtually no cultural diversity to speak of; where very little actual distinctions existed, there seemed to have been a need to invent artificial ones. This is how I explain to myself the extremely elaborate system of social rules and distinctions that are documented in the College Archives: seemingly arbitrary rules and distinctions that were erected by the undergraduates themselves.
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