Pro CC
Ananda Burra ‘07 puts some of the recent complaints about College Council in perspective.
This last weekend, CC campus, made up of the at large and class reps, spent almost 10 hours reading applications and 5 hours locked in a tiny room in Goodrich picking people to be in the MANY student faculty committees CC oversees. Sure, these committees might be ineffective, they might not have done much in the past, but they do represent the student body. We had over a 150 applications so these are things people want to join. Now Oren Cass might believe that I, as an at large rep, thoroughly enjoyed reading through a 150 applications - let me assure you, I didn’t. We all had things to do that were more fulfilling and probably more important to us. But we did sit there in that damn room and get through it. I don’t know how many people would have given up so much of their time and energy to something they really had no involvement in.
I think that Cass’s rhetorical skill occasionally blinds him to the fact that College Council does a lot of good and important work. His failure to acknowledge this makes his good points less persuasive then they might otherwise be. Burra writes:
And if anyone has the gall to claim that CC does nothing, read the minutes. Godfrey Bakuli is already a celebrity on this campus thanks to his work in removing the snack bar tax. He is not the only one. Jonathan Landsman managed to get the college to open up 2 kitchens for students who live on campus in the summer. Eylul Kasal is working on getting the academic hardship policy of the school modified so that it includes midterms. Jesse England has been working for a while on getting academic and social advising for sophomores. I, along with other council members, have been trying to grapple with the network problems this campus has been facing. The list goes on. If you think these are small projects of minimum value, you seriously are living in your own little bubble.
Indeed.
Eph Alum in Controversial Election
Interesting article on Rives Kistler, a sitting Oregon Supreme Court Justice whose candidacy is being challenged by a clearly less qualified candidate apparently because of his sexual orientation:
http://news.statesmanjournal.com/article.cfm?i=79593
If you ever want to donate money to an Eph running for public office, this seems to be the perfect candidate. Let’s hope Oregon voters are smart enough to not toss someone who appears to be a highly accomplished jurist out of office simply because of bigotry.
College Council
As David has pointed out, Oren Cass is doing a very good job pointing out the idiocy of College Council, here’s his latest. I obviously can’t speak for how effective College Council was 5 or 10 years ago, my sense from talking with some senior administrators who are equally frustrated with the current CC as others are is that in the past it has been a useful debating body that actually did good for the student body. This seems to indicate that there is not a systemic failure, simply one of leadership of late.
Oren is rightly jumping on CC for worrying about its logo as a way of gaining legitimacy. The problem of late is that every year they waste their time on some meaningless gimmick to give themselves legitimacy rather than actually trying to accomplish stuff that will earn them the student body’s respect. This is a point I raised last year in an editorial:
Another issue currently being kicked around by CC’s leadership is the name of the Council. In an e-mail to the Council, CC treasurer Mike Henry suggested changing CC’s name to “something like Student Senate, Student Government, or even College Governing Council.” According to Henry, there is “so much in a name, and I think this change could be one step in the direction of achieving more legitimacy for Council.”
CC is justifiably concerned with achieving more legitimacy from the student body. The way to do this, however, is not by spending five weeks haggling over its leadership or whether College Council is a “weak and ambiguous name.” The way to gain respect from the student body is to fight for causes the student body cares about.
Even if some consider parking a smaller issue, the broader question of transparency looms over this discussion. How did the administration use the same argument for months to keep students out of the garage when one piece of paper in town hall appears to refute the basis of the College’s entire argument, at least for 67 spaces?
Even if CC, for some reason, considers parking a small issue, there are other areas where it could focus its attention. The College’s plans for student services once Baxter is taken off-line - a subject the administration has said it welcomes and, in fact, needs student input on - is another issue CC should be actively pursuing. An organized student voice is needed as well to assure the availability of performance space for student organizations after all of the construction projects are completed.
Unfortunately, CC is not addressing these issues. That is why it has a legitimacy problem.
Similarly, three years ago when the CUL released a well-thought out report that had been researched over 18 months, both CC and the then-”House Presidents” reflexively rejected it in its entirety after less than a half-hour discussion in each case. These people simply do not think about issues seriously (I’m not referring to all members of Council — some are individually thoughtful — simply the general trend).
I guess at some point serious people will again take over College Council, but I don’t see an end in sight to this lunacy that has been going on for years.
Ephbid
Good idea but excessive graphics, I would say. Others may differ:
Speak English we do well here. Also page layout and colouration the site hideous is.
The classic line about such writing is a description of Time magazine from many years ago by Wolcott Gibbs. “Backward sentences ran until reeled the mind.”
Where Yoda gets it from sure I am not . . .
Tips Data
I have been looking for more data on the tips debate. Director of Admissions Dick Nesbitt ‘74 was kind enough to both reply to my e-mails on the topic and to allow me to reprint his comments here.
In response to your query about athletic tips, her are some things to keep in mind:
We have significantly reduced the number of tips from 75-80 in the late 80’s and 90’s to 66, beginning with the class of 2004.
Football has been most significantly cut back from a yearly average of 19-20 matriculated tips (in the 80’s and 90’s) to 14. This is the lowest of any NESCAC school, and compares with 25 per year at Ivy League schools.
While we have been reducing the number of tips, we have also reduced the number of “low band” tips by 50% over the number enrolling just five years ago.
While we do not normally give out SAT averages for any specific group, figure on about a 100 point differential [combined] for the 66 tips. That would make the average for the tips about 20 points higher than the average for the entire class of ‘88 ;)
Comments:
1) Many thanks to Nesbitt for taking the time to reply and giving me permission to publish his comments here. Virtually everyone at the College that I ask questions of — from Morty on down — is helpful and forthcoming. Many lesser colleges are not run but such open and honest folks. [Toady! -- ed. I call them like I see them.]
2) I have been extremely anti-tip and pro-athletics throughout this discussion. I am much less anti-tip than I once was. I had, mistakenly, thought that tips were significantly different from the rest of the student population in their academic competence. But a 100 point difference on combined SAT scores just isn’t that important.
3) Moreover, all the changes that the College has made in the last few years — especially the decrease in low band tips — are ones that I agree with. To me at least, the College’s current admissions policy seems perfectly reasonable. I could even be pursuaded to be in favor of the changes advocated by Dave Barnard.
4) Nesbitt is, as his punctuation makes clear, somewhat joking in his reference to average SAT scores for the class of 1988. Since the SAT was rescaled a few years ago, you can’t compare scores from before and after easily. Back in the 1980’s, the recurring joke for senior classes was that, since Williams admissions were more competitive each year, the senior class was always the dumbest on campus. It would be really interesting to see some good time series data on this trendline. For example, has the difference between the median SAT at Williams and at places like Harvard/Yale/Princeton really been decreasing over the last 20 years? I don’t know.
WSO Blog Fun
There is a good on-line discussion on Martin Mudd’s WSO blog about current atrocities in Sudan. As always, Aidan has the best line.
This is for all the self-styled liberals out there: you can’t have it both ways. You can’t lament abuses, wish the US could “go in there and do something” without being committed to a much large military, to a unilateral foreign policy, to, frankly, imperialism. You can’t demand action and yet abhor it.
Aidan also makes excellent use of Kipling’s classic poem “The White Man’s Burden.”
Meta-Meta
Oren Cass ‘05 has never been a fan of College Council, and his latest Record op-ed and associated comments on his blog.
Right now, College Council (CC) is little more than an ineffectual bureaucracy making meaningless proclamations and embarking on small projects of minimal value. Sort of like Williams’ very own United Nations, minus the cool ethnic costumes and translators. But all that will soon change, because CC has organized a contest to design a new Council logo.
They don’t have cool ethnic costumes anymore? Where’s the outrage? Back in the day, representatives from Carter House wore their distinctive head gear (baseball caps with the top of a hammer as a logo on the front) to CC meetings.
Cass ought to change thesis topics from the political economy of open source to something, like CC, that he is contemptuous of. He does contemptuous incredibly well.
Although Cass is probably right about the logo issue, he is certainly wrong to condemn all of CC. Certainly the folks on the finance committee — if that is what it is still called — who do the budgeting are serious folks doing their best to do a serious job.
Alma Mater
Reunion is just over a month away. If your year of graduation ends in a 4 or a 9, you should go. If you know someone going, you should go with them. If you are on the fence about going, you are underestimating how much fun it will be. I can’t put it any better than MacGregor Jenkins ‘90 (that’s 1890).
He walks the familiar paths, he passes doorways through which he has gone a hundred times as a Freshman, Sophomore, Junior and Senior…[h]e smiles as he recalls that it was in this doorway or at that corner that some incident occurred which he felt at the time marked an epoch in his life, now a faint…memory. He passes Jesup Hall where he has labored in the small hours at his self-imposed task of journalism, he passes the darkened Labs where he has experimented and Morgan where he lived in those ample days of Sophomoric expansion…He recalls the hours of study, the long walks alone among the hills, evenings of discussion, and the constant urge to think, to understand, to express and to create. But tonight the divergence in detail of their interests is lost and forgotten in a common sense of nearness and intimacy, born of greater and more enduring things than personal traits or preferences. It is not the athletic field, or the editorial sanctum that fills their minds. It is Williams. It is the College. It is Alma Mater in the true sense of that significant phrase.
Hat tip to the most excellent web site set up by the class of 1998 for their 5th year reunion last year.
Eskelsen Replies
In response to this post, Grant Eskelsen ‘05 kindly e-mailed some further thoughts, reproduced below with his permission.
sometimes you write things and then are surprised about how many people read what you have to say. that’s how this column is for me: i put my thoughts out there and then am very surprised at how many people read it and talk about my thoughts. but i thought your blog (thank you for the link) was a very fair critique. i did go a little overboard in my discussion, particularly in the
use of adjectives, but i still do believe that there are lessons in athletics
that, as you note, can’t be learned anywhere else. i think these lessons can
be learned not only by participating, but also by watching, and i think it’s
part of a liberal arts education that you should try and learn those lessons.
and, i think you are close to an exception about what is most memorable.just to make clear, i’ve never played a varsity minute. never will. i think
you missed my thesis a little though, if you think that it was that athletics
is the most important part of a Williams students life. it’s not, and i agree
with your assessment that if it becomes so, something is very very wrong at the school.my thesis was this: athletics is just as vital a part of community as any part of the dance or guest speaker curriculum. i don’t think that athletes should ever believe those who don’t make it to the games are not busy, because they are, but i think it should go both ways. i think that athletes should be at the Berkshire Symphony concerts, should make it to more lectures (we can’t do that now, as we’re in practice at 4:00 when most of the lectures are scheduled; for more on this, see my next column in the record). my thesis was that athletes and non-athletes should be supporting each other in all aspects of their lives, not just the dance studio or cole field.
at williams we talk about community but it’s not in practice. and for all of
our talk about the purple bubble and the williams connection, it’s hypocritical if we don’t have it. i still stand behind that argument, and i think you missed something if you only infrequently made it down to the games. there’s something to be learned from watching as well as playing. you never know when you might see something that changes you forever, here at Williams or wherever you may be.
I agree with almost all of this. Indeed, one of the (smaller) regrets that I have about my time at Williams is that I never made it to one of the epic Williams/Amherst basketball games in the old gym. Apparently (other alum memories would be helpful here), the smallness of the gym and the packed running track above the floor led to the sort of intensity that the new gym, even with a better team, can not match.
So, I wish that I had been smart enough to realize 20 years ago that experiencing this at least once would have been a wise use of my time.
EphBlog will be down for maintenance Tuesday, May 4th (only briefly).
The server that EphBlog resides on it getting an upgrade of several key bits of software that make it tick. It will be taken down at 11am (EST) on Tuesday the 4th and “should” only be down for 15 minutes.
This will give key upgrades to the FreeBSD OS that it runs on, as well as the MySQL database, the PHP engine, and Perl among other things. This will provide improved security, slightly better performance in some areas, and easier programming of some of the server side things that I do.
Fingers crossed that it breaks as little to nothing as possible.
Faculty Lunch
Only fans of town/gown interaction will appreciate a news story entitled “Selectwoman opposes Williams Faculty Club serving lunches over the summer.”
Selectwoman Margaret J. Ware believes that Williams College should be a more courteous neighbor.
Monday night, during the Board of Selectmen meeting, Ware took issue with Williams’ decision to serve lunch at the Faculty Club this summer.
“It would be perfectly wonderful for the faculty and staff to go into town and spend money,” Ware said.
In related news, Ware also proposed that the College discontinue its policy of providing housing to students. “After all,” said Ware, “think of all the money that students would spend on — and my constituents could earn from — new apartments in the area!”
Of course, Ware is not the only character with a funny line in this dispute.
During the Monday meeting, Peter Landry, Williams College assistant manager of dining services, was there seeking one-day alcoholic beverage licenses and an extension of its liquor service on one night during senior week.
Ware asked Landry why the club would be opening for lunch.
Landry said the club was being made available for the convenience of faculty and staff, who likely would not have time to leave campus for lunch.
Ware argued that local merchants would probably develop a “grab and go” system for those people in a hurry.
You have to feel sorry for Landry. He was probably just checking the boxes on his list of responsibilities when, out of nowhere, this selectwoman starts quizing him on faculty eating habits. Still, his claim that faculty lack “time” during the summer is, uh, amusing.
I am sure that if you walk by Stetson on some summer Friday afternoon, you would be amazed how it buzzes with activity, filled to bursting with faculty members too overwhelmed with work to take notice of the beautiful day outside, much less to steal a moment away for the long treck to Spring Street for lunch.
Of course, how those faculty members find the time for the even longer walk to the faculty house is unclear to me . . .
Eph Basketball News
Fans of men’s basketball might want to know that
Richard Martin, a 6-3 guard/forward who [was] first team All-Dade and second team All-State, committed to play for Williams College of Massachusetts. Williams was the 2003 Division III national champion and a runner-up in 2004.
Presumably, to be second team All-State in Florida, you need to know what you are doing. No word on whether or not Martin was a tip.
I never thought that I would read an applicant’s decision to attend Williams described as “committed to play.” No word yet on whether or not Martin also “committed” to taking classes or reading books.
Joking aside, I have a great deal of faith that Basketball Coach Dave Paulsen ‘87 will ensure that Martin does more than just play basketball for four years.
Illegal Library Seizure?
Here’s the rough outlines of the story of Amherst’s founding as I was told back in my freshman year: In 1820, half of the faculty felt Williamstown was too isolated and cold, so they walked off with half the library and founded Amherst in the more cosmopolitan Hampshire County.
This story always made we wonder a couple of things:
1) Why didn’t Williams ask for the library back? After 170+ years, a few of the books may be worth something;
2) Did the defecting faculty members take their 401K’s with them?
3) What made the defectors think Hampshire County would be any warmer? Was the college merely ridding itself of deadwood professors?
4) Who took the college’s NMR machine (given the state of the machine we used in lab, my guess is that Williams kept it)?
In looking for answers to these questions, I came upon this article on the history of Amherst: http://www.amherst.edu/~rjyanco/amherst/history/1894tyler-ws/chapter01/menu.html. The piece is full of slanderous lies and misinformation. The author (an Amherst alum to be sure) argues:
A) The charters for Williams and Amherst were drawn up at the same time;
B) Most of the trustees for Williams were located in Hampshire County;
C) The defecting President was hired with the understanding that the college would be moving;
D) The board of trustees voted to move the college to central Massachusetts;
E) The Massachusetts legislature voted to move the college to central Massachusetts.
If such accusations are true, the intrepid professors who stayed behind (and kept half of the library) were the defectors! It also means that it was Williams who stole half of the library.
Were those chants of “DE-FEC-TORS … DE-FEC-TORS” aimed at the wrong team? Is my allegiance to the virtuous founders of our college (a man who lost a battle) ill-founded? Is my ire at the shiftless defectors of Amherst (Lord Jeff gave small-pox infected blankets to Natives) misplaced?
Update on Lynch and “Illegal” Settlements
I made the claim that Associate Professor of Political Science had an article in the Axis of Logic — a cite that is clearly not, shall we say, smack in the middle of the main stream. I made the claim because, well, here is the article.
In the comments to that post and private correspondance, Professor Lynch kindly points out that he, in fact, did not seek to publish his article on the Axis of Logic. I am glad to have the opportunity to correct my mistake. In fact, Professor Lynch published the article in TomPaine.com, a public interest journal.
All of which leaves me with two questions. First, are the settlements, in fact, illegal? Professor Lynch pointed out that there is some relevant material at the Foundation for Middle East Peace (www.fmep.org), which happens to be run by Philip Wilcox ‘58. See here for thoughts on the legality of the settlements. See here for a refutation. (Thanks to Max K in the comments for the link.) My conclusion is that terming the settlements illegal is biased and incorrect.
Note that this might help to explain why the anti-Semites at Axis of Logic decided to republish Lynch’s piece, as opposed to hundreds of other articles from sites like TomPaine.com that they decided not to publish. Again, just because the fever swamp folks at Axis of Logic like Lynch’s writing does not mean that he is a swamp denizen himself. But the fact that they do should give Lynch pause.
Second, why isn’t Lynch interested in a discussion of topic? He say that he is “not going to get involved in a pointless debate about the legality of the settlements in the occupied territories.” Why not? And why is it pointless? Of course, it is a free country and Lynch is under no obligation to discuss anything at ephblog or elsewhere. But, given that we have current Williams students reading and partipating at ephblog, and strongly disagreeing with what he claims to be a fact — that the settlements are illegal — I would think that he has an obligation to participate, at least a bit.
This is the interesting aspect of ephblog. We read what fellow Ephs have to say and take it seriously. Perhaps Lynch is not used to that, or at least not used to having readers of opinion pieces like this (as opposed to some of his more scholarly work) who do not already agree with him. I don’t know. However you slice it, Lynch is making a factual claim that I (and other Ephs) believe is clearly wrong. If, in a civil and public forum, he declines to defend his claim, readers can draw their own conclusions about his intellectual seriousness.
Lest this sound too harsh, let me say again that I am a fan of Lynch. Anyone with the sense of humor needed to produce pieces like this has got to be a good guy. Moreover, judging from a distance, Lynch seems to be at least as engaged with Williams students outside of his own classes as any professor at Williams. And, to the extent that you care about such things, his record of publications is one of the more impressive in the department.
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