It began with a first-person account of an elite college’s callous treatment of a rape victim, written by a woman from the rural South who said she never felt fully accepted on campus. The resulting storm has engulfed Amherst College, leading to debates about not only rape, but also group identity, tradition and how directly or publicly a school should confront its problems.
It may be that no college leader in the country was as well prepared to face this controversy than Biddy Martin,president of Amherst since September 2011. As an academic, she has written extensively on gender and sexuality, and as an administrator, she has a history of tackling — though not always successfully — thorny disputes. Months before sexual misconduct became the dominant issue on campus, she started overhauling the way that Amherst handled sexual assaults.