Amherst College
The Amherst College [ æmərst kɒlɪdʒ ] is a very prestigious private liberal arts college in Amherst ( Massachusetts) in the United States of America. It was founded in 1821 and now has over 1600 students with study objective Bachelor and over 170 professors and lecturers.
As one of the Five Colleges it is cooperating with four other colleges in the surrounding area since 1975. The University colors are purple and white.
The Amherst College is named godfather of Asteroids Amherstia, which was so named by its discoverer, the former Amherst students Raymond Smith Dugan.
History
The Amherst College is the successor to the Amherst Academy, which was named after the small town of Amherst and attended, among others, by Emily Dickinson and Noah Webster. As the Williams College to the west of Massachusetts temporarily threatened the relocation or closure due to financial problems and its remote location, 1821 Amherst College was founded. 1825 received the first 25 students graduate.
The first black student graduated in 1826 - that is, in the second year, in the Amherst ever awarded degrees and only three years after the first probable student with black ancestors (mixed -race ) at a U.S. university had earned a bachelor (Alexander Twilight at Middlebury College).
Since 1975, female students are admitted.
Campus
The Amherst College is located directly south-southwest from the center of the small town of Amherst on a hilltop. The terrain is characterized by the American standards largely of old buildings and the park-like well-kept area around the buildings.
The campus is built around a central tree-lined lawn, bears because of their square shape about the name Main Quadrangle (main square) or short quad. On the north side of the lawn is the main library. The pages are lined with brick buildings with white elements (windows and door frames ), which accommodate student dormitories especially; back slightly to the west is also the Johnson Chapel, which is today used for offices. The south side of the lawn area is not cultivated. Here are the sports fields to the heavily sloping terrain behind a monument for fallen soldiers views of the Mount Holyoke mountain range in the south of Amherst free. A little to the west of the campus, on the highest point of the hill, is a small, former observatory.
Academic quality
The Amherst College competes with the Williams College to the reputation of the best liberal arts colleges in the USA. In the controversial college rankings of U.S. magazine U.S. News & World Report always takes in recent years one of the two colleges in first place, followed by the other; Ranking in the edition of 2007 stood at No. 2 Amherst
The Amherst College is considered the U.S. university with the highest donations percentage of their former students - currently has about 61 % of the former students to the donors. His foundation funds ( endowment ) are now at $ 1.66 billion, bringing last 27.8 percent and $ 461 million income per year ( as of 2007). Then there are the usual income especially from tuition and research grants.
Study conditions
The Amherst College offers over 800 courses in 33 subjects. Owing to our cooperation in the framework of the Five College students can also take courses of the other four universities occupy (and vice versa), in individual cases, courses for students beyond the Bachelor degree at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Owing to our cooperation also the libraries of the universities are networked.
The tuition fees at Amherst College are high, but for a U.S. college his reputation not exceptional: The total cost (including cost of living, ie mainly dormitory fees) were for the academic year 2006/2007 at $ 43,360. 66 % of students receive financial aid, which can range from a reduction of tuition fees up to the full cost transfer from Amherst College.
Cultural institutions beyond the campus
The Amherst College is the owner and administrator of the Emily Dickinson Museum, which includes the birthplace and home of Emily Dickinson as well as the neighboring house of her brother. To property of the College includes about half of the manuscripts of the poet.
According to the will of his former student Henry Clay Folger, the college also manages the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC - An independent research library with the largest Shakespeare collection in the world and an attached theater, in addition to research and restoration of old documents also offers a varied cultural program.
Sports
Since 1899, Amherst sports teams regularly measure with students of Williams College and Wesleyan University. The competition was initially known under the name Triangular League ( triangular league). In the 1920s, the still common name Little Three ( "Little Three " ) was, in contrast to the corresponding rivalry between the Big Three ( "big three ": Harvard University, Yale University and Princeton University).
Since recently, Amherst students also compete with students from other universities in a number of college leagues: the third division ( Division III) of the National Collegiate Athletic Association ( NCAA), the Eastern College Athletic Conference and the New England Small College Athletic Conference.
Personalities
Third President of Amherst College from 1845 to 1854 was the geologist Edward Hitchcock.
Hermann J. Muller, the college was biology professor from 1940 to 1945, won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The poet and four-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Frost was from 1916 to 1938 professor of English at Amherst; after him is named today the main library. The three-time Pulitzer Prize - and Oscar-winning screenwriter Archibald MacLeish taught English by 1963 until 1967. Too, the mathematician and economist Charles Wiggins Cobb held a chair.
At Amherst College numerous later scholars went. To them, the economist John Bates Clark include ( completion 1875), the astronomer Raymond Smith Dugan (1899), the sociologist Talcott Parsons ( 1924), the mathematician Stephen Cole Kleene (1930 ), the physicist Henry Way Kendall (1950) and the economist Edmund Phelps ( 1955).
In the policy, including the 30th President of the United States, Calvin Coolidge (1895 ), the reigning Prince of Monaco, Albert II (1981 ), the President of El Salvador ( 1999-2004), Francisco Flores Pérez (1981 ) went Kenyan presidential candidate and opposition leader Uhuru Kenyatta (1985) and the former Prime Minister of Greece George Papandreou and the civil rights activist Albert S. Bard.
( Medicine 1989, 1961) and Joseph E. Stiglitz (1964; Economics 2001), Nobel laureate, the students were Henry W. Kendall (1950 Physics 1990), Edmund Phelps (1955, Economics 2006), Harold E. Varmus.