After serving as a naval officer in the Pacific in World War II, he received a bachelor’s degree in English from Amherst College in 1946. In 1950, he earned a law degree from Harvard, where he was an editor of The Harvard Law Review.

As a young lawyer, Mr. Cross became general counsel for the Sheraton Corporation of America, the hotel chain. In the early 1960s, Sheraton sent him to San Francisco to put an end to a sit-in over racially discriminatory hiring practices at one of its hotels. The task made him uneasy.

“It seemed to me that I was working on the wrong side for the wrong people,” Mr. Cross told Fortune magazine in 1987.

He took a leave of absence and became involved in civil rights work, participating in the second of the three historic voting rights marches that began in Selma, Ala., in 1965. A lifelong Democrat, Mr. Cross later advised the Johnson and Nixon administrations on economic development opportunities for black Americans.

Amherst had already kicked its fraternities off-campus in the mid 1980s and converted the houses into upperclassman residences. Fraternities were not abolished, however: A handful of fraternities have survived and continued from that point up the present day, with the understanding that their activities must not occur on the Amherst campus. Now, the administration has taken a further step against Psi Upsilon, which we believe is an unprecedented action, at least since the early 1990s when we began arriving on campus.

We’ve received a copy of an e-mail to the Amherst student body from Tony Marx, which we’ve reproduced below. We don’t have any other information and have not heard if the national office of Psi Upsilon has issued a reaction (assuming that Amherst’s Gamma chapter was currently affiliated with the national organization at the time of Marx’s announcement). We’ll keep you posted as we get more information. You can also contact us at amerst@gmail.com

——Original Message——
From: President’s Office [mailto:president@amherst.edu]
Sent: Wed 2/17/2010 8:22 AM
To: all-students
Cc: Allen Hart
Subject: Ban on Membership in Psi Upsilon

To the Amherst College Student Body:

The Trustees’ Resolution on Fraternities mandates that no College facilities shall be used by fraternities or sororities; there can be no such activities on campus. The Board established this rule to help ensure that our community lives up to its ideals of inclusivity and equality of opportunity. The Student Handbook clearly states that fraternities and sororities that conduct activities on campus, as well as students who participate in these activities, will be judged in violation of this resolution.

As a result of a serious violation involving the leadership and members of the off-campus fraternity Psi Upsilon, and on the advice of the College Council, the College now prohibits all students from joining this organization. This ban is effective immediately. The College will take disciplinary action against any student who is found to be a member of or participating in any activities sponsored by Psi Upsilon, whether those activities are held on or off campus. Disciplinary sanctions in such cases may include suspension or expulsion from the College.

The College may review this decision after a period of at least four years. In light of recent events, members of other off-campus fraternities and sororities should be aware that the College will be monitoring their compliance with the Trustees’ resolution, and that any violations may result in the prohibition on membership being extended to all off-campus fraternities and sororities.

Yours,

Tony Marx

In his commentary on some of these sides…Teachout shows himself to be gifted with not only a trained ear but prose adequate to expressing what he hears… The master at this sort of on-the-spot jazz description was the New Yorker’s Whitney Balliett; Teachout is equally good at it, and this reader could only wish there were time for similar accounts of all the great Armstrong solos.

Read coverage from the College website, from The Boston Globe, and the Albany Times Union.

Also, check out photos from the game.

“In a difficult economic moment, when institutions and individuals have fewer resources, these unrestricted gifts to the endowment represent extraordinary votes of support for Amherst College, and the mission of educational quality and access at liberal arts colleges in general,” said Anthony W. Marx, the college’s president.

The money will be allocated as needed, Marx said, including enhanced financial aid, hiring more faculty and building new facilities or renovating existing ones.

The college launched a $425 million fundraising campaign in October 2008.

The school’s statement included comments attributed to both anonymous donors, including one from the $100 million donor who called Amherst, “a jewel of enlightenment, social mobility based on talent and preparation for leadership that we must all maintain.”

Peter Rooney, a spokesman for Amherst, said the school is confident based on research it did that the $100 million gift was the largest ever given for unrestricted purposes to a liberal arts college.

Standing behind the president during a bill signing is a shining moment for any policy activist. For Paul Rieckhoff, it came last week when President Obama signed the Veterans Health Care Budget Reform and Transparency Act into law.

Having served in the Army for six years and as an infantry platoon leader in Iraq, Rieckhoff knows something about the challenges active-duty soldiers face overseas and later when they come home.

Rieckhoff’s experience inspired the 30-something executive director and founding member of the nonpartisan Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans for America to challenge the way the country supports veterans.

Warren’s appointment is noted in a post on the Reader’s blog titled “The Reader’s New Publisher Is an Edit Guy”:

Warren has been a newspaperman since he graduated from Amherst in the mid-70s; he moved to the Tribune from the Sun-Times in 1984, covered labor, law, and media, and was a surprise choice to edit the old Tempo feature section, where writers told me he was the best editor they’d ever had. In 1993 editor Howard Tyner sent him to Washington to work the same magic there. Warren quickly made a name for himself in the capital by writing a Sunday column in which he mocked the city’s media stars by name for their preoccupation with self-promotion and fat personal-appearance fees.

These are messy, even bloody issues, but the cost of not addressing them is too draining of our societal health. Among other things it fosters a society in which too many young Americans internalize the aura of criminality that’s projected onto them and handcuff themselves to self-imposed limitations that stifle us all.

Episcopal Life Online has a detailed obituary that tells the story of his life, from his early days in Michigan to Amherst and beyond, including his work in the Navy during World War II and with civil rights rallies in Southern California in the early 1960s.

Burt was born in Marquette, Michigan, the older son of the Rev. Bates Burt, first rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Marquette, Michigan and then rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Pontiac, Michigan. He attended Amherst College where he was the managing editor of the college newspaper, president of his fraternity and vice president of his senior class. He graduated cum laude in 1940. After a post-graduate year in New York City where he studied at Columbia University and worked as a social worker at Christadora House on the Lower East Side, Burt entered the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia, graduating cum laude in 1943. Following ordination, he moved to St. Louis, Missouri to serve on the staff of Christ Church Cathedral in downtown St. Louis and as director of St. Paul’s Parrish. It was in that year that he met his future wife, Martha May Miller.

Burt served as a chaplain in the United States Navy during World War II in the Pacific theater. After the war, he became the Episcopal chaplain of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, followed by a seven-year tenure at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Youngstown, Ohio, where he received the Arvona Lynch Human Relations Award and became the founding president of the ACLU, playing a leadership role in the racial integration of community housing and swimming pools.

WITH THE TRAIL GROWING COLD AT EXETER, Storrs wondered what he could uncover from Brown’s days at Amherst College. He reached Alan Lelchuk, who taught the creative-writing seminar that Brown later credited with helping him become a novelist. Brown’s writing from the class left little impression on Lelchuk. Of course, it would have been easy for anyone to be eclipsed by the enormous talent of fellow student David Foster Wallace, the heady prose stylist now regarded as one of the most gifted writers of his generation. “With Dan, he was not the star of the class, as David was, as were one or two others who were really quite good,” Lelchuk told Storrs.

“Dan was good,” he finally admitted, as if for the sake of politeness. “But in a much quieter way.”

Chow began work with the Peace Corps the fall after his graduation, in Kenya. He transferred to Tanzania in 2008.

From the Peace Corps press release:

“Joseph was active, creative and charming. He was always ready to lend a helping hand, to work and play, and to contribute to his community. His sudden passing is terribly painful for the entire Peace Corps family, including Joseph’s students, whose lives were changed by Joseph’s passion for teaching,” said Director Williams. “Our thoughts go out to his family and friends around the world.”

We here at Am’erst.com join with Mr. Williams in expressing our condolences for this terrible loss.

For the last four years, Mr. Landman has headed the effort to unite the printed Times and nytimes.com into a single, seamless operation, giving him a powerful hand in the Web site’s operation at a time when it was rapidly expanding and adding new features.

A Gawker report reprints Executive Editor Bill Keller’s memo to staff regarding the appointment:

I doubt anyone will question that Jon brings to the Culture Department a strenuous intelligence, an inspiring vision, a gift for getting the very best from people and — no small thing as our competitive landscape shifts — a keen appreciation of what culture journalism can be on the Web.

We feel the impact of the streak. It’s a reality of us doing business. We see it, we feel it, we hear it. But our evaluators and instructors should be insulated from the 17 years. Hopefully, we’re able to continue moving forward to put this team in a position to win for many years, and not try to break the streak one year and then figure something out after that.

Few people hold a more uncomfortable place at the health care debate’s intersection between nuanced policy and cable-ready political rhetoric than President Obama’s special health care adviser, Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel.

In “Learning From the Beatles,” an essay originally published in Partisan Review in 1967, Dr. Poirier was one of the first commentators to argue that the album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” represented an intermingling of pop and “serious” cultures that deserved close critical attention.

He also wrote about the impact of Vietnam on the culture and the significance of the 1960s revolution, and he once compared Bette Midler’s command of parody to that of the writers Mailer, Ralph Ginzburg and Thomas Pynchon.