Four months after Tony Marx’s little driving incident in New York, a few of my Amherst friends and I started to wonder what Tony is up to now, and just how his whole crusade to make Amherst one of the most socio-economically diverse colleges in the country all began. I dug around a bit to find out more about his mission and the controversies surrounding it.
After attending the Bronx High School of Science, Wesleyan University (third wheeling since 1899), Yale University (for his B.S.), Marx spent a year in South Africa, participating in the Anti-Apartheid movement. He returned to the US to attend graduate school at Princeton, but frequently returned to South Africa to help with the founding of Khanya College, a secondary school that prepares black students for university.
Marx’s passion for making the world’s elite colleges socio-economically diverse runs deep. This was the reason the search committee chose him as president of Amherst. (Cool fact: at 43 years old when he took over as president in 2003, Marx is the youngest president in the history of the college). Marx was a working as a political science professor at Colombia when one of his friends, an Amherst alum, submitted him for consideration for the job. The search committee originally rejected his file, but later took it out again and decided to meet with the guy. Marx talked about how the nation’s elite institutions don’t give enough chances to poor and underprivileged kids, and this leads to a decrease in the possibility of social mobility in our country. Marx’s goal as president of Amherst was to change that.
The trustee’s liked Marx’s message, and gave him the job. But his crusade was controversial. Saying that lower SAT scores from an underprivileged student are equal to higher scores from a privileged student meant a decrease in the average SAT scores of accepted students. Some people feared that this would jeopardize Amherst’s high U.S. News and World Report ranking, and make the school seem less attractive to applicants. Some professors feared that having more students from less elite high schools would mean having to work extra hard to catch those students up in class.
Despite all these concerns, our school is still excelling. U.S. News and World Report still ranks us as the number 2 liberal arts college in the country (and we all know the act that the fact that Williams is number 1 is totally arbitrary). We have a highly competitive acceptance rate of 15%. And thanks to Tony Marx, we are one of the most socio-economically diverse liberal arts colleges in the country. As one of my friends says, “My mom loves Tony Marx. He’s the reason Amherst is so cheap for us.” It’s pretty cool to be at a college where its strides towards complete socio-economic diversity are at the forefront of elite schools. The Amherst student body looks fondly upon Marx’s efforts to make this place more diverse. And most of us can agree that Tony is a pretty handsome guy. “He’s so good-looking,” I’ve heard many a friend sigh.
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Amherst chapter and does not reflect the views of Her Campus.