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With the exception of Kungu, whose Amherst email is no longer active, the administrators’ names were all scrubbed from their departments' webpages on Thursday, though most of their names are still listed in a campus directory.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[?]"
In another post, a student claimed that "the admin decided to fire the leaders of the QRC, MRC, CARC, RSL, WGG," using abbreviations for the organizations led by the various administrators. Though Amherst has made no public statement about their departures, the school announced on Wednesday that a fifth official, Vice President for Communications Sandy Genelius, would retire in June.
"She has been instrumental in both moments of celebration for our community—such as the roll-out of the Mammoth mascot and the College's Bicentennial—and in meeting any number of challenges, from the pandemic to the contemporary media environment," Amherst president Michael Elliott said of Genelius.
Hanna said that Genelius's retirement "had been planned for months" and was unrelated to Allen's article. None of the four administrators responded to requests for comment.
The layoffs are the latest aftershock of the Free Beacon report, which included images and videos of students acting out oral and group sex on the chancel of Johnson Chapel. After footage of the debauchery went viral, Amherst asked the Free Beacon to blur the faces of students pictured in the videos, claiming that they had experienced "serious doxxing, harassment, and threats."
"I am writing to respectfully request that you consider blurring the faces of the participants in the videos and photos in the story about Amherst College that you ran last week," Hanna wrote in an email to Free Beacon editor in chief Eliana Johnson. "Blurring the faces will, we hope, make it a little harder for trolls and others to identify and harass the people in the videos."
The Free Beacon declined to edit the photographs and videos.
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