Amherst College Laying Off Administrators Behind Sexually Explicit Programming
“The school also announced that its vice president of communications would retire at the end of the school year.”
We covered this story when it happened. Good to see there are consequences for it.
The Washington Free Beacon reports:
Amherst Lays Off Administrators Behind Sexually Explicit Programming and Announces Communications Chief Will Retire
Amherst College appears to have laid off four administrators in the wake of a Washington Free Beacon report on the school’s sexually explicit orientation programming, according to two people familiar with the matter and a review of archived webpages. The school also announced that its vice president of communications would retire at the end of the school year.
The administrators include Hayley Nicholas—the head of the college’s Queer Resource Center and its Women’s and Gender Center—as well as Jane Kungu, the head of the Multicultural Resource Center. They also include Assistant Director for Religious and Spiritual Life Shahar Colt and Class and Access Resource Center interim director Scarlet Im.
Some of the administrators were involved in planning Amherst’s “Voices of the Campus” event, during which students performed mock sex acts in the college’s main chapel. Others helped to organize a drag show with “queens” such as “Stanley Coochie.”
An Amherst spokeswoman, Caroline Hanna, denied that the administrators had been fired, claiming instead that “several positions were eliminated in Student Affairs as part of a long-planned divisional restructuring.” She declined to specify which positions were eliminated or to say why the college hadn’t announced the restructuring.
With the exception of Kungu, whose Amherst email is no longer active, the administrators’ names were all scrubbed from their departments’ webpages on Thursday, though most of their names are still listed in a campus directory. The changes came after multiple students alleged that Amherst had fired the administrators in response to the Free Beacon report, which was authored by Jeb Allen, the president of Amherst’s sole conservative student group, in mid-December.
“It can’t be a coincidence that there are multiple staff members who were specifically mentioned (by name or positions) in j*b’s article who have since been laid off,” one student posted on Fizz, the campus social app, on January 11. “Why isn’t anyone talking about this[?]”
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“It can’t be a coincidence that there are multiple staff members who were specifically mentioned (by name or positions) in j*b’s article who have since been laid off,” one student posted on Fizz, the campus social app, on January 11. “Why isn’t anyone talking about this[?]”
“JOURNalism!”
“Genius!”
“Thank you!”
For a lark, I stalked those names to see if they were all crazy white chicks. The answer is no — at lest not white. But in the process, I learned that Amherst’s page for “Meet the Queer Resource Center Staff” has been scrubbed down to, “This page does not yet have any content.” It sure had content for the past ten years.
For liability reasons, a University will never publicly comment on the reason for a personel change. They don’t have to disclose the real reason to the specific employee.
I chose to measure progress in terms of qualifications when a university hires new people. A Masters in Education degree in student administration is a bad sign as is the requirement to submit an essay on how the applicant will address social justice or DEI concerns.
There are important First Amendment issues at stake, both in terms of free speech and freedom of association. Is the planning of new student orientation in the hands of a student committee? Were resource center staff attending their planning meetings? Was attendance at the orientation week events mandatory?