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.