As one of the premier liberal arts colleges in the country, Hamilton College has long advertised itself as an institution that caters to students interested in a wide variety of academic fields. The College’s motto, “Know Thyself,” and its most recent marketing slogan, “Study What you Love” have emphasized a long held image that the school is truly an institution dedicated to the liberal arts. Spending more than five minutes on the College’s website will show how important the liberal arts education is to Hamilton College’s desired image. However, according to many students interviewed by The Spectator, Hamilton College inaccurately advertises its commitment to the liberal arts and is skewed towards fields related to Economics and Government.
The Economics and Government departments at Hamilton have the most students, with each having 325 and 165 concentrators respectively, roughly a quarter of Hamilton’s student body. Every Hamilton department offers access to department-specific resources, and the size of the Economics and Government departments reflects the size of their resources. Other students choosing majors such as Theater, Literature, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Cinema and Media Studies also have access to these resources in theory. However, they often find themselves overlooked and under-supported when compared to their peers in Economics or Government. Similarly, many students from humanities departments view the Career Center as skewed towards programming offered to help students going into economics- or government-related fields, as opposed to helping students wanting to pursue other career paths.
Juliet Davidson ’23, a theater major at Hamilton, explained, “I don’t think Hamilton has a lot to lose if their theater department isn’t great. But I think that they would have a lot to lose if their Government department was suddenly in shambles. If they had intense faculty turnover rates [like the Theater department], and six majors [in the senior class], they’d be in big trouble, right?” Davidson believes that the Theater department, despite having the new facilities of the Kennedy Center for Theater and Studio Arts (KTSA), is still under-supported. “The Theater majors below me: some of them feel really involved and others feel really neglected because of the lack of resources. I think it’s because of a lack of opportunities within the department, which there aren’t a lot of to begin with.”
Christian Hernandez-Barragan ’24, also a Theater major, echoed this sentiment, “I would love to have musical theater courses that I could take because there might be shows in the future that I audition for that might need that musical component. And because they don’t offer anything like that, I feel like sometimes I’m behind in that process of auditioning and stuff because I’m not as experienced or I don’t have those resources for that specific track.” Hernandez-Barragan is double majoring in Theater and Government and attests that he has experienced a disparity between the two departments, “The Gov department is pretty good at meeting, if not exceeding, one’s educational goals, whereas the Theater department sometimes falters in its roundness of what they offer in terms of the coursework and the skills they teach. I think part of the reason why is obviously just because I think the department itself is really small.”
Professor Mark Cryer, the current head of the Theater department, backed up the College’s support of the Theater Department. He firmly stated, “They just spent millions upon millions of dollars eight years ago for our new building. So there is zero doubt that Hamilton College and the administration are thoroughly, completely invested in Theater here for our students.” He later clarified that the department’s main problem was “Inflation. You know, the cost of everything has gone up. Theater is expensive. The analogy I use is when you move from an apartment to a house, you naturally have to buy more furniture and more such as you’re in a bigger space…the administration is pretty good in terms of funding. There’s always a natural tension between budgets all the time, but we’re plugging along.” Speaking about any improvement that could be made to the Theater department, Professor Cryer compared Hamilton College to America: “America’s a great idea, and it needs constant work. Hamilton’s the same way. It’s a great idea. It’s a great institution to work at, to teach at. The students are fabulous, but it takes constant work.”
Similarly, Professor Bill Salzillo, the current chair of the Art Department, feels that Hamilton College does stress its liberal arts availability to its students, and for the most part, succeeds. He emphasized the curriculum’s interdisciplinary nature for its commitment to the liberal arts. Contrary to many students’ beliefs, he believes that each department has an equal footing in helping their students achieve their academic and career goals, “If you want it, it’s there.” He stated that since KTSA was built in 2014, the Art department has flourished and today, “We have a third more than the normal amount of concentrators in every class year. We’ve been very lucky to have an administration that supports the arts this way. KTSA is as good as, if not better than, most other arts facilities of other small liberal arts colleges.”
Surya Gowda ’23 is majoring in Art and Government and stated that in her time as a double major, not only does the Art department struggle with supporting its students, but the Government department also faced difficulty as well. Gowda stated that she is grateful for the resources that have been made available to her at Hamilton, but said that “For Art, I definitely think…the school isn’t equipped for, or wasn’t expecting to have such a high turnout of art majors.” She explained that Art concentrators receive a stipend for their thesis, which this year was only $110 per semester for each student. Gowda explained that given the need to purchase new materials for her project, the stipend was not large enough, especially since Art concentrators do not always have access to the school’s resources, which are needed for art classes. Professor Salzillo encouraged Art concentrators to apply for grants to make up for the gap in funding for their thesis projects.
When speaking of the Government department, Gowda said, “I think for the Gov department, there aren’t enough staff for the nature of discipline. The American Politics major kind of disappeared our sophomore year. I was actually going down that path of being an American Politics major, but I think there was only one professor who was teaching a course within that section but he left, and they haven’t really hired back.”
Lena Schneck ’23, a Pre-Med Literature major and Psychology minor, also had cited disparities between departments during her NYC abroad program last spring. She said that, “In the New York city program, I went on when it was the environmental ethics program. But to me, it was very clear that it was meant to be an Economics thing. [The housing] is a five minute walk from Wall Street. The only consistent theme within the program is Economics, like it’s another topic one semester then it’s Economics. It’s another topic then it’s Economics. And then they’ll have something like an Environmental Ethics, or the Photography program. But it always returns back to Economics, and so it’s not like other departments every other semester are getting to do whatever they want. They have to accommodate around the Economics program.”
Schneck has also taken a couple classes in the Art department and stated, “I know, for instance, the Art senior thesis people, they have to apply for funding through grants because the stipend they’re given is not enough. But then they guarantee the apartments in New York City [for the abroad program] or the other opportunities that are provided…Clearly more resources are being allocated to people in the Economics department compared to humanities because they have the NYC program every other semester.”
Professor Cannavò, the current chair of the Government department, spoke about the overarching effects of society on the departmental disparity at Hamilton: “I do think as a society we have increasingly downplayed, even denigrated the humanities…so I think that there tends, in institutions, to be a bias toward the sort of valorizing or privileging of certain fields where you make money or fields where you exercise power. That really ties in with our whole capitalist system, with the notion that the fields that matter are fields that involve either the control of money, the earning of a lot of money or just political power and influence. And Government and Economics relate to those areas.” Professor Cannavò stressed that he did not want students to major in Government “just for a career,” and that such decisions contributed to the denigration of the humanities he mentioned before. He also said that this issue of departmental disparities was not unique to Hamilton College. “If you look at other colleges, other institutions, there will be a similar bias.”
Schneck thinks this preference to the Economics and Government departments may affect larger departments as well. She told
The Spectator
that, “I think that Economics is generally given more attention.” When asked why, she replied, “I think if you look at who’s pouring money into the school, it’s probably people who have been successful in [finance].” Schneck however also explained that she didn’t necessarily blame the College for this disparity because “they are a business and an institution that wants to produce successful results. Just realistically, people are more likely to be ‘successful’ on Wall Street than produce the next great American novel. They’re also interested in what’s going to attract new students the most. It’s seeing people who are successful after college, so it’s not like, ‘Ooh, we have a new class of struggling artists.’”
In attempting to show the discrepancy between how Hamilton advertises itself and the reality, Schneck related a story, “I don’t think that the ‘Study what You Love’ thing really applies to the Economics department — a week ago I was getting ice cream and I heard a kid say that he wanted to go into finance for 10 years, make a ton of money, and then leave to do something that he actually wanted to do. That’s a common story too. You do Economics, you work on Wall Street for 10 years. You make money to make money, then you leave and do something else. That’s not studying what you love. That’s studying to make money.”
Professor Owen, current chair of the Economics Department, told
The Spectator
, “I like it when my advisees do different things and not just finance. I think that makes them actually better economists when they have different perspectives, so I really do value that breadth, but we’ve got to figure out how to do both and strike that balance.” Professor Owen elaborated on this balance, saying, “It’s a struggle to figure out how you know what the right balance is between this kind of breadth of the liberal arts, but then also supporting programs that are in high demand so that they can give students a good education. And then doing that with the resource constraints that The College has, it’s difficult. If you go too far in one direction, say, oh, we’re going to get rid of programs, we’re not going to have as much breadth. Then we really lose something. We really lose this breadth of the liberal arts that everybody values.”
Nicolette van Kesteren ’23, a double concentrator in Creative Writing and Public Policy, told
The Spectator
, “I think I definitely decided to do the public policy major because I thought it would look better on my resume than just being a Creative Writing major. I love creative writing as a passion, but I know that that’s not something I’m interested in doing [because]…now I’m thinking I want to go to law school because I also want to make money like everyone else, although I also do have a passion for [law].” When speaking about perceptions of the Creative Writing department, van Kesteren stated that, “People have this perception of creative writing, they think it’s for ‘nerdy’ kids who will write weird fan-fiction stories in their bed. But creative writing is actually a really interesting art form that, if more people explored it, maybe they would enjoy it more. But, nobody really pushes creative writing. They always say, ‘Oh you need to take math and government and this stuff,’ nobody says like, ‘Oh, you need to take poetry.’ Maybe if more people needed to take poetry, there’d be more Creative Writing majors.”
The effects of this disparity are felt strongest in Hamilton’s smallest departments. Caroline Casey ’23 who is majoring in Women’s and Gender Studies and minoring in Government, told
The Spectator
, “Just in the Hamilton community, [WGS] is not respected among students and among other professors. I’ve definitely experienced that in job searches and in Hamilton’s culture in general, there’s a lot of stigma and not that much respect. I think people have a lot of assumptions about those who choose to talk about oppression and feminism.” She continued her statement by saying, “I don’t think the administration actively cares for the [WGS] department, helps it to grow or works to cultivate it like it does the Economics and Government departments. I’ve never experienced it actively working against the department, but I have heard those stories and narratives within the department, from professors. It’s kind of a strategic preference simply because there are just so many more students majoring in Economics.”
Like Schneck and van Kesteren, Casey believes that, “As a business, [the College] has to market to people what they think they want. And I don’t think anybody thinks they want Women’s and Gender studies until they maybe come and take a class. I do think, if you were to interview high school seniors about coming into Hamilton, you’re going to get a lot of Economics and you’re going to get some History, STEM and Pre-med.” Noticing this indifference of the WGS department, Casey believes that “The department is vulnerable to being downsized or given less resources because of how many students choose to major and minor. I also don’t think we have an incredible alumni network in the Career Center.”
The Spectator
reached out to Professor Adair, the chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, and Professor Margaret Gentry, a previous chair of the WGS Department, former Associate Dean of Faculty and former Interim Vice President of Academic Affairs. Both professors declined to comment on the story.
Natalie Harrity ’23 is double majoring in Economics and Environmental Studies and told The Spectator that, “Honestly, I didn’t go into college thinking I wanted to be an Economics major, which I think a lot of Economics majors do. But I took Intro to Econ fall semester freshman year. I just liked the thinking behind it, that more quantitative style of thinking.” When asked about the differing experiences between the two departments, Harrity replied, “The Economics department is way bigger, all of our classes are in KJ and just the resources are so much nicer. Environmental Studies is usually in Benedict or some random building, not even the Science Center. One class was even in the Alumni Gym.” Harrity also attributed the Economics department’s size and her TA experience to her strong relationships with her Economics professors. “I think I’ve gotten to know Economics professors better also because there’s a lot of classes, and I was a TA for Intro with Professor Georges. And then I TA’d during COVID with Professor Owen for 166. So I feel like through that, I’ve been able to come closer with Economics professors.”
Career Center Falling Short?
The Spectator
spoke to Sam Welch ’86, the Executive Director of the Career Center, about how he sees its role in helping students. When asked whether the Career Center was supposed to help find students jobs or other post-graduation plans, he replied, “Our job is to give students life skills. You’re going to have the same exploration many more times in your life — students are going to change career paths, they are going to decide to do different things… we’re also trying to expose students to a real breadth of what they can do in life. You know, a lot of students come in with preconceived notions of what they could or shouldn’t do. So a part of our job is to expose students to a broad range of career paths and things that they can do that may align with what they really love, what they’re passionate about.”
Welch felt that the Career Center does a good job in offering its services to all students equally, countering sentiments that the Center was catered towards Economics or Government majors. “It’s a misconception that we work really hard to push back on. I think one thing that all students should understand is the number one career path for students at Hamilton is education and nonprofit work. That is where the bulk of our students go. It has been for quite a while. We divide all of our programming, all of our alumni work and all of our industry education into eight industry categories, and we measure both where our students are going, and we measure what we’re providing to students in the process. We try really hard to make sure that the programming we do to expose students in those industries is equal across those eight sectors.”
The Career Center has also created the Connect and Discovery Teams, groups of students trained to help their peers in their career endeavors. The Discovery Team’s focus is helping students with resumés, cover letters and how to network. The Connect Team’s focus is helping students with breaking into the eight specific industry sectors that Welch mentioned: Arts & Entertainment/Communications, Business/Finance & Consulting, Education & Nonprofit/Government & Law, Health care/STEM and Affinity & Identity/Major Panels & Life Skills.
Welch emphasized that the Career Center was designed to work with students, not for them. “We have the tools that everybody has. They’re our resources here on campus and our alumni database. If an [Art student] doesn’t put their information into our database, we can’t help that person make those connections. They’re going to have to figure out other ways to do it. And that’s where I’d say the life skills come into place. So I’m going to teach you the skills to find at least two people that are in the arts that maybe you can talk to. Networking is a skill we’re going to have to teach that some people are really uncomfortable with…That’s a skillset that we can teach, but I can’t necessarily make those connections for the student.”
When speaking of the Career Center as a resource, Davidson ’23 said that in her meeting with a Career Advisor, “I met with her about grad school and I was like, ‘I don’t know what to do. How do I apply for grad schools? What should I do?’ Because I was interested in doing a stage management program, looking at production or getting my acting MFA so I could teach. And she literally had no idea how to help me…There aren’t even resources on the website, like the little sections where it says Pre-law, Pre-med, but there’s not a Theater one and there’s not an Arts one. So, she just didn’t know how to help me.”
Hernandez-Barragan ’24 has had minimal experience with the Center, as he explains, “I personally have never really used the Career Center as much because of the things that I’ve heard from other people. I’ve heard that they don’t help or they refer only to look on Handshake or do a Google search and that they don’t really give you enough resources to find any career options or actually help you find anything.”
Gowda’s perception of the Career Center mirrors that of other students. She asserted that “I think the alumni network is more heavily skewed towards my Government major. For example, say I did want to work in the arts. It’s very limited. And I think now the school and the Career Center are amping up programming to fill that hole a little bit more, but it’s always going to be more business heavy and more Econ or Gov focused.”
She later explained that she did not believe this was just about the Career Center, but that “The school is really heavily swayed towards setting up students for business.” Gowda said that she thinks the College “puts in more funding in things that they think will turn out more profit and get alumni who will make more profit in the future. There’s a connotation that artists will not necessarily have that same income. So I think at the end of the day, it’s always about how much money you can get back from students.”
Schneck agreed that the College disproportionately represents careers in Economics or Government as opposed to careers in Literature. “Career options in things like Econ, Gov and STEM of almost any kind are much more concrete than humanities-based careers. And I think a part of it is, what alumni do you see that are like famous authors? Rarely any — you see people who are successful either on Wall Street or creating Netflix or something else like that. There’s the rare instance of becoming a writer or actor, but again it’s very rare that you see someone in the humanities departments that is advertised. Those people are relatively unknown. Do you know who they are? No. But you know who David Solomon is, you know who Marc Randolph is.” Schneck mentioned that she believes Economics concentrators are more focused on the career they will work in after college than Literature majors and acknowledged that finding a career in Literature is more difficult that finding one in Economics or Government. “I’m sure that, like in Economics departments, you hear about people talking about their internships or like what Wall Street thing they want to work for. And that just doesn’t happen in Literature. No one talks about post-grad stuff.”
The experience van Kesteren ’23 had with the Career Center was less than ideal. She explains that, “They haven’t helped me whatsoever. I went in there knowing I was interested in law, but they’re just super unhelpful. They keep pushing the Handshake narrative. They don’t spend time with you figuring out, ‘Oh, what are your interests?’” Like Schneck, van Kesteren believes that the Career Center is not entirely at fault as she explained, “I feel like Hamilton College doesn’t really even know who the Creative Writing alumni are, but I know that when they have networking events, or even the trustees thing [a senior networking event on March 3], it felt like they were trying to showcase their most ‘prestigious’ trustees or those with these high paying jobs that are very focused in the corporate world and not really any creative people.”
The Career Center also has seemingly showcased students’ achievements that they played no role in helping with, implicitly taking credit for their achievements. Casey spoke at length about her experience with the Career Center reaching out to her about an internship she did at the Whitney Museum last summer. “I got my internship at the Whitney Museum the summer after my junior year by myself. I found it, and I applied. Somebody at the museum mentored me, but I never talked with the school. After that, somehow the school found out about my internship, and I was asked to be interviewed for the Careers news page on the [Hamilton] website. So there’s an article about me for that. Since then, I’ve been asked to speak on multiple panels for the Career Center about my internship, but I never spoke on one because I think it’s really weird for me to go to speak on behalf of the Career Center about my experience. I think it’s interesting that they didn’t help me get there, but when I got an internship at a prestigious museum, it became a story on behalf of the College to then brand themselves. They saw I had a successful opportunity through my own efforts and wanted to capitalize on that.”
Similarly, Hernandez-Barragan was on the D.C. abroad program in the fall semester and, like the other students on the program, had to find his internship for the semester on his own. He recalled, “The career center said that they wanted to do a story. So they reached out and were like, we want to do a story on the D.C. internships. Where do you work? What do you do? And I told them, and they never followed up at all which I thought was interesting. I worked at the Kennedy center, which is a performing arts center in D.C. But I worked in the government relations department. I wanted a mix of both majors, Government and Theater, and so that felt like the perfect internship for me, because it mixes both of my majors together, so I was just confused why they reached out to me when I don’t think anybody else [in the D.C. program] was asked at all.”
Harrity is also a member of the Connect Team at the Career Center, and explained, “I feel like the Career Center is more geared to people that need that extra push… and as far as resources, the strength of the Hamilton Career Center is the alumni. So it’s kind of on you to reach out to them.” However, Harrity also noted the difficulty smaller departments face: “I think there just aren’t as many alumni, so all of those resources are just going to be less useful. But in some ways that could be a good thing if there’s fewer alumni in the sense that maybe the ones that you do reach out to are more likely to want to help you because they know that it’s harder to get a job.”
When asked about the Career Center’s ability in helping students from different concentrations, Professor Owen explained, “It would be much easier for Economics and Gov majors to use the [alumni] network simply because their network is bigger.”
On the topic of the career center, Professor Cannavò believes that because of the capitalist system we live in, “The people, the donors, the alums who have influence, who have more money, they’re going to get sort of more visibility with the Career Center…The College is very dependent on donations from alums that are interested in donating. What types of things they want to support may not necessarily be in line with what is really needed for the College’s educational mission. What the College does to market itself may not necessarily be what is necessarily the best thing in terms of providing a good liberal arts education. So there are certainly tensions that come up, but I think the administration is very genuinely committed to the College’s education as a place of learning.”
A professor who wished to remain anonymous told
The Spectator
that Hamilton draws in students inclined to certain fields due to the culture of the school, and that, “The assumption that certain majors allow for more money after college is huge, but it also has to do with the history of the College as an institution.” When asked about their opinion of the Career Center’s ability to prepare students of all majors equally for life post-graduation, they simply replied, “It doesn’t seem like they’re able to.” They tied this statement in with their belief about the school’s alumni network that “When they’re thinking of alumni, they’re thinking of cultivating big donors. I think [the College] should also think of how alumni can help students envision alternative life and career paths.”
The professor concluded, “I want to teach students that there is uncertainty ahead, and you won’t get rid of it by choosing Economics or Gov. Imagine other ways of living a full life than these paths that have been set out for us. And no matter the major you choose, feed your imagination!”
