Ephblogger Wick Sloane is featured in this article about the Massachusetts Legislature’s idiotic proposal to tax university endowments (which will certainly never pass — given that this would severely undermine the Commonwealth’s most prominent industry, higher education). See here for a response from Williams and its supporters — note that the ample reservoir of local goodwill Williams has earned from its donations to local schools is among the best ways to counter this type of legislative initiative.

The three top discussions on WSO last night involved: 1) Railing at the hypocrisy and silliness of the College’s environmental initiatives, 2) Pointing out the stupidity of Cluster Housing and speculating on the date of its inevitable demise, and 3) Mocking excessive concern for Muslim sensibilities.

And people say that I am out of touch with the opinions of current students. Untrue! I am just a year or three ahead of my time . . . here, here and here.

In this episode of Eph Interviews, I speak with Chet Lasell about Professor Bob Waite, the press hoopla over his fraternity’s decision to admit African-Americans and the joys of sportswriting for The Berkshire Eagle in 1957, a magical autumn for the Williams football team.

 

 Interview with Chet Lasell [18:29m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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The QLDC would first like to thank EphBlog for the opportunity to post here and get the word out about some things going on at Williams. Publicity and public debate are essential to anything of this kind.

The QLDC was created to defend the quality of life of Williams students by advocating their rights as consumers of the services provided by the college. Its specific goals are an end to compulsory reductions in the Williams quality of life, and public disclosure and debate of all proposals to reduce this quality of life within the student body. Those interested about the basics of the QLDC should visit the Facebook group.

So far, the QLDC has publicized itself through Facebook and through a major poster campaign across campus on Sunday, May 4th. A second poster campaign is coming very soon. The first caused a minor controversy over the imagery used; check out the original image used here - it’s pretty innocuous, and the eighth entry on a Google image search for “heraldic eagle.” We’ve also been the subject of a scrappy WSO thread.

To briefly summarize the issues that prompted the QLDC to take a hand in the campus sustainability debate:

The college currently plans to make all dining halls trayless next year, as they’ve tried with Driscoll this year. Our sources indicate some very interesting things about this proposal. Driscoll operating costs have gone up since trays left; apparently trayless dining makes such a mess more man-hours have to be spent cleaning. Student use of Driscoll has also gone down. This would indicate the student body would prefer trays, given the choice, and the response to the early QLDC posters certainly reinforces this impression. The dining halls are designed to work with trays; why can’t those who want to go trayless do so on their own?

The low flow showerheads and faucets that Williams Hall was equipped with recently are also planned for the entire campus by next year. This will certainly reduce water usage, but that begs other questions: if there’s no water shortage here, why are we making water conservation a priority? Won’t filling up a Nalgene take the same amount of water, and more time, with low flow plumbing? Won’t students take longer showers as they struggle to wash? Why can’t sustainability-heavy entries request these changes on a case-by-case basis?

There is no question that these are not huge issues. The way they were decided and publicized, however, is a huge issue. Most Williams students didn’t know about these plans until the QLDC made them public. Williams students are clients of the college, which provides them services. Surely they deserve some input in the nature of these services.

This is why the QLDC urges every Williams student to join the Facebook group petition. The petition reads:

The signatories (group members) of this petition are against:
1. Compulsory traylessness at all dining halls.
2. Universal, compulsory low flow showerheads and faucets in dorms.

Furthermore they request the following of future campus sustainability measures:

3. Open debate in the student body previous to final decisionmaking.
4. Voluntary compliance to permit those who do not wish to participate to opt out.

Thank you for taking the time to read about the fight in defense of the quality of life of all Williams students. Watch for us, on campus and online.

The Williams College Quality of Life Defense Council

DEFEND WILLIAMS

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There is much gnashing of teeth and rending of Williams sweatshirts in Dodd Neighborhood tonight.

Cluster Cup Results
1st Place: Spencer (41 points)
2nd Place: Dodd (39 points)
3rd Place: Wood (27 points)
4th Place: Currier (26 points)
Congratulations, SPENCER! In addition to winning the Cluster Cup Trophy, you are invited to attend a special neighborhood dinner at Whitmans’ on Thursday, May 8. Look for a special invitation in your mailbox soon as admittance will be granted by invitation only.

So close to that Whitmans’ dinner! Comments:

1) There is an official Cluster Cup Trophy? Pictures, please. Also, any readers at the dinner tonight should provide us with a report.

2) Last fall I claimed that the Cluster Cup competition was doomed to failure. Has it failed yet? How many events were there this spring? How many people participated? How many watched?

3) Although we are stuck with Neighborhoods for at least a couple more years, there is no reason to waste everyone’s time on a competition that no one cares about. End the Cluster Cup now and devote your energies elsewhere.

I will be posting more material associated with the debate over Williams in New York. Below is the letter that Professor Robert Jackall sent to faculty members in response to the Waters Report. Comments:

1) How is this report delivered to faculty members? Is there an e-mail list for all faculty at Williams that something like this (and other material) goes out on? Or physical copies put in faculty mail boxes? I am always curious about the mechanics of exactly how Williams functions.

2) It is a shame that material like this is not made public. Any document that is distributed to 300 faculty members is, essentially, in the public domain anyway. It is not hard (for me) to find an anonymous source to provide a copy as I have done here. But it is a bother. Any document like this should be posted on the web. The College is doing somewhat better on this front (note the collection of letters from the President and the Provost) but more transparency is better.

3) For those to lazy to read Jackall’s response, I will summarize and comment. He offers three arguments for a No vote (which would keep WNY going). First, the Report does a shoddy job of gathering and presenting data. Second, it “misstates” the costs of WNY. Jackall clearly wins on both these points. Indeed, if I were the person (Morty?) in the Administration who wanted to end WNY, I would be upset about what a subpar job the Committee did. Even if you didn’t think that you would learn much from interviewing the students from Fall 2007, you still needed to do so. Jackall argues, third, that the Committee misunderstands the purpose of WNY. I think that there is a lot more to be said about this aspect of the debate, but not today.

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Ah, the class of 1988. They graduated my senior year, and in this installment of the show, I speak with Scott Berman, who helped throw a rather infamous party in the Infirmary, a party I remember attending. Human sexuality classes, the hour of power and wandering in the outback, it’s all here.

 

 Interview with Scott Berman [14:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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The May faculty meeting is going on right now, I think. How about an update from our loyal faculty readers? The two items on the agenda that we have been following most closely are the fate of Williams in New York on the scheduling of a day for Claiming Williams. My recommendation would be a No vote on the resolution: “Should the Williams in New York Program be discontinued?” and for tabling the proposal on a Claiming Williams Day until the organizers come up with a more thorough plan and generate some meaningful support from the student body.

And we all know that, as goes EphBlog, so goes the Williams faculty!

On the transparency front, some questions: Are faculty meetings public? Back in the day, they were. I attended one and the Record would regular report on them. Assuming that the meetings themselves are public, are the minutes available as well? I have not tried to get them (a copy is mailed to all faculty members a few weeks after the meeting) but I don’t see them posted on the web. Even more fun would be a live broadcast or after-the-fact podcast of the meeting. If EphBlog’s popularity proves anything, it proves that there is a large audience for every little detail of life at Williams.

What are we to make of the “Williams College Quality of Life Defense Council?” Start with their Facebook group.

The Manifesto
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1. Our MISSION is the guardianship of the quality of life of Williams students.
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2. The Council has undertaken this mission because no one else has. The Williams PARADIGM is one of a vocal minority imposing its will on a silent majority. The Council is the voice of that majority.
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3. The Council considers itself an ENVIRONMENTALIST organization. It seeks to oppose the misguidedness of certain environmental measures, not their environmentalism.
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4. The Council will oppose any supposedly environmentalist measure that REDUCES the campus quality of life or increases fiscal demands on their tuition without a reasonable benefit to the environment.
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5. Furthermore the Council asserts that by paying tuition Williams students gain the right to a say in what they’re buying. It will therefore oppose any supposedly environmentalist measure that reduces the campus quality of life or increases fiscal demands on their tuition without first consulting the OPINION of the student body.
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6. The Council requests SUPPORT, direct and indirect, anonymous and public. Please read the Recent News section to learn how to help.

Good stuff. Diversity of opinion is wonderful in all issues, environmental debates included. There was some dispute on WSO as to whether or not QLDC is for real but I think that they are. I have invited them to post here at EphBlog.

This episode of the series is with Ed Hughes, in which we learn about putting ringers in touch football games on the Freshman Quad and what happens when you have to feed your entire fraternity on a Sunday.

 

 Interview with Ed Hughes [10:53m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Of interest:

Another amazing set of minutes (an hour of minutes?) from hard-working College Council Secretary Emily Deans ‘09. Read the whole thing but note these comments on WNY.
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In today’s episode of Eph Interviews, I speak with Katie Kent, class of 1988 and currently Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Williams. Learn about her memorable first day in Williamstown and what it’s like to be a faculty member at the college you attended.

 

 Interview with Katie Kent [14:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Here (pdf) is a listing of the top 50 private equity firms in the world. The most prominent Eph in the business is probably Joe Rice ‘54, ex-Marine, ex-Williams trustee and founder of Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, number 28 on this list. But surely there are other Williams graduates in senior positions at these firms. Who are they?

Click below for full image. Extra credit for anyone who can identify the beer in our shirtless Eph’s hand.

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Interested in my thoughts on the debate over WNY? Read below.
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In this episode, I speak with Jack Kent and learn about the location of the now vanished Williamstown train station, the lectures of Philosophy Professor Bill Miller and a lost opportunity to go trout fishing with Frankie Todd.

If you like these shows, get ready for one a day for a while. I’ve got a lot of interviews scheduled. For instance, tomorrow, I’ll be talking with Jack’s daughter, Katie Kent ‘88, who teaches English at Williams.

 

 Interview with Jack Kent [11:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

What proportion of Williams students should come from abroad?  The debate on the relative merits of international candidates is an Ephblog staple, and last week, the topic re-emerged following the publication of a New York Times article on elite Korean prep schools.  The piece detailed the intense academic environment at the Daewon Foreign Language High School in Seoul, which students attend with the goal of eventually gaining acceptance to a prestigious American university.

We, however, have a man on the scene.  Williams graduate Joe Foster teaches at the Daewon School and was quoted in the Times article, testifying to the dedication of his students.  He was kind enough to discuss, via e-mail, his experience at an education institution very different from those we are accustomed to.

Ephblog: How did you wind up at the Daewon School?

Foster: Well, my parents are both teachers and I was raised at a boarding school in California, where my father was a dean, so I’ve been around education all my life. Maybe for that reason I always harbored some resistance to both school and teaching. After the dot-com crash, though, I was ready for a change and some travel, so I came to Seoul. I didn’t have much of a long-term plan, but I got a job teaching SAT prep and really took to it — in fact, I completely fell in love with teaching. I stayed at that job for four and a half years, and the first time I looked for something else I stumbled across the Daewon position. I’ve been at Daewon for just over a year.

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Our readers love stories about Bethany McLean ‘92 and her central role in uncovering suspect accounting at Enron. Consider this 2002 op-ed column from Maureen Dowd.

Hollywood is trying to figure out how to turn Enron into a TV movie.

How do they take all the stuff about ”the contingent nature of existing restricted forward contracts” and ‘’share-settled costless collar arrangements,” jettison it like the math in ”A Beautiful Mind,” and juice it up?

Enron is such a mind-numbing black hole, even for financial analysts, that if you tried to explain all the perfidious permutations, you’d never come out the other end.

A movie executive asked Lowell Bergman, the former ”60 Minutes” producer who is now an investigative reporter for The Times and ”Frontline,” for the most cinematic way to frame the story. (Mr. Bergman had the ultimate Hollywood experience of being played by Al Pacino in another corporate greed-and-corruption saga, ”The Insider.”)

”It’s about the women up against the men,” he replied.

Before you know it, Enron will be Erined, as in Brockovich. Texas good ol’ girl, fast-talking, salt-of-the-earth whistle-blower Sherron Watkins will be Renee Zellweger in a Shoshanna Lonstein bustier. The adorable and intrepid Fortune reporter Bethany McLean, the first journalist to sound an alarm about Enron’s accounting practices, will be look-alike Alicia Silverstone.

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Some [Enron executives?] privately trashed Ms. Lynch as ”an idiot” and coveted Ms. McLean, calling her ”a looker who doesn’t know anything.” But when they realized the women were on to them, the company that intimidated competitors, suppliers and utilities tried to oust Ms. Lynch from her job and discredit Ms. McLean and kill her article.

Which Enron insider said that? Or is Dowd talking about her vision for the movie?

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Here are some updates on the fight to save Williams in New York. (Don’t forget to read the Report.) Below you will find the text of an e-mail being sent around to various alumni (including at least one trustee) and the letter to the faculty that alumni/students are being asked to sign. But first, my advice to Ben Sykes ‘08 and the other students leading this fight.

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I mentioned in the post on my own blog that I enjoyed this interview very much, although I don’t think we ever addressed what is the real strength of his book, which is explaining the crisis in layman’s terms. I know here on Ephblog, SIV’s, laundering tranches of sub-prime mortgages through credit rating agencies and credit-default swaps are old hat, but for those of us who don’t deal with this on a daily basis, The Trillion Dollar Meltdown is a good primer by a bearish market observer. I know he enjoyed the interview, and I am thinking about having him back on later in the year.

I mention in the interview that there were a lot of questions I just never got to. Among those questions were:

 

 Interview with Charles R. Morris [33:48m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download