Tue 30 Mar 2004
David, why are you consistently surprised that the college is trying to solve collective action problems and market failures in order to attract faculty? Williamstown has a very small population and is surrounded by very poor towns. The few developers in the area are smart and make their living building very expensive vacation homes where the profit margins are higher. Most of the rental units in town are either run down or more suited to students.
Williams could wait and hope that suitable apartments are built for faculty by a private developer. In the mean time, they will have disgruntled junior faculty members (who don’t want to buy a house because they might be leaving in a year or two), but don’t really appreciate living in an apartment last inhabited by the rugby team. Believe it or not, academics with more than one job offer (i.e., the quality people Williams hires) care about their community surroundings. Why shouldn’t Williams solve the problem directly and quickly?
Williams is not alone in these pursuits. Yale has developed large sections of New Haven. Columbia has been fixing up Harlem for years. UPenn has very aggressively been promoting home ownership and rehabilitation of houses. Even MIT worked hard to develop the area around it in Cambridge. In fact, almost every university and college I can think of engages in some effort to direct the development of their surrounding community.
The goal is to make the college a more attractive place for both faculty and students. Colleges are like sports teams in a lot of ways. The goal of the Milwaukee Bucks is to sell tickets and merchandise by entertaining fans (parallel: attract undergraduates and alumni donations). The Bucks hire two types of employees: competent administrators behind the scenes and the best basketball players on the planet (parallel: administrators and professors). The administrators generally are paid less because more people possess their skill set. In contrast, the basketball players are highly paid because they have numerous teams competing over their rarified services. The best basketball players are essential to entertaining fans, so the Bucks not only offer piles of money, but also improve the working conditions for the players. Bending over backwards to keep players happy ends up being cheaper than each individual player more money because players often desire the same amenities (e.g., big lockers with AV equipment, team massuese, etc.). The Bucks could save costs by hiring sub-par basketball players who are just happy to be in the NBA and would never leave Milwaukee, but the quality of basketball played would suffer and fans would grow upset and stop spending $.
The college faces the same dilemma with professors. They COULD hire professors with no other options or, as you keep suggesting, limit themselves to alums who are blinded by school loyalty (believe it or not, Williamstown has a LOT of disadvantages when it comes to recruiting faculty members). Hiring mediocre instructors would absolve the school of ensuring that there is adequate housing for faculty or that the school actually educates students (btw: it isn’t like there are a lot of private school options around Williamstown — Pine Cobble is very expensive). However, students might detect the drop in quality of education and would start to prefer schools like Amherst and Swarthmore and Pomona who continue to hire the best professors available. Williams would then fall in the rankings and that would upset alumni, who would give less money to the school.
You heard it here first, Williams professors are very smart and contribute usefully to their field. Two separate professors from Williams have told me that one of the most annoying thing about teaching at Williams is that students think they could become professors. The vast majority of Williams students do not possess the necessary intelligence, passion, or work ethic in order to become a professor at Williams. And yet, they persist in thinking that professors have cushy jobs and are glorified high school teachers. Part of what makes Williams special is a commitment to hiring exceptional researchers and teachers. (Granted: Williams does not have the resources of Harvard so they miss out on the Nobel laureates and the like, but they do put a high quality product on the field. Think of Harvard as the Yankees and Williams as the Kansas City Royals — The Royals aren’t a great in MLB, but they would beat pretty much every other baseball team in the world). The reputation for a high quality education is attractive for students and opens doors to graduates, which creates happy alums.
David, your suspicion of market distortions serves you well in about 90% of life, but it is misguided here. Professors want decent housing; Williamstown lacks certain types of housing; so it is in the college’s interest to fix the problems. Professors desire high quality schools for their children; Williamstown is populated by vacationers, retired persons, and a no-collar working class — none of whom demand high expenditures on education; thus, it is in the college’s interest to see that Mount Greylock High provides a good education to students. Sure, the administration might misjudge particular programs and demands of faculty, but the impulse to fix problems in Williamstown in order to attract and retain faculty seems right to me.
The alternative is to do what half of the Williams faculty did 170 odd years ago: pick up and move to a more cosmopolitan area like Northhampton.
March 31st, 2004 at 6:59 am
There are a lot of sensible comments here, many of which I find unobjectionable. Unfortunately, our commenting mechanism does not allow for html formatting, so I’ll save a longer response, with nice quoting, for another post. In the meantime, a couple items:
1) Junior faculty who “might be leaving in a year or two”? This is precisely the sort of faculty that Williams should not be hiring — think Bryan Garsten or Russ Muirhead. The typical junior faculty appointment is for at least 4 years and almost always 8 years. Someone making a committment to be at Williams this long should be able to find housing, perhaps after a year or two of College provided shelter.
2) I am open-minded on the idea of the College as property developper. But 115 units? That seems excessive. Of course, if you build it (and price it cheaply enough) then they will come, but I don’t recall that the College had any sorts of huge faculty recruiting problems in the mid-80’s before, I think, it had this many units to offer.
3) On the topic of Williams professors who say that “one of the most annoying thing about teaching at Williams is that students think they could become professors” — Hmmm. Isn’t that special! Presumably, they were not talking about you. I hope that they, or at least the ones that wrote my graduate school recommendations, were not talking about me. Since many of my classmates were smarter than me (and I have the not-that-high GPA to prove it), I wonder who they are talking about . . .
March 31st, 2004 at 8:26 am
Unrelated to the discussion at hand - but I went in and turned HTML formatting back on in comments.
The upside: you can use HTML formatting in your comments.
The downside: if you just paste in URLs, then they don’t automatically get converted to links. This is an MT thing, not my own choice.
March 31st, 2004 at 8:31 am
David, you will notice that Williams did not hire me (nor did Columbia or George Washington — the schools I actually interviewed at). For all I know the piece of advice was trying to scare me away from academia. My point was simply that Williams does and should hire the best teachers AND scholars that they can. That means hiring people with other options, so quality of life is an important issue.
And some professors leave because after living at Williams, it turns out that rural life or the liberal arts setting is not for them (Williams, I love you, but give me Park Avenue). There is learning on both sides. Williams learns whether the professor’s teaching and scholarship is up to its lofty standards and the professor learns whether (s)he and her/his family can be happy at Williams.
One side note: Williams does make use of visiting faculty member frequently. Non-tenure track lecturers typically have appointments of 1 or 2 years.