Announcement on Quay ‘04
Here is the College’s e-mail.
I am very sad to tell you that Bob Quay ‘04 died on Friday, June 25, as a result of injuries sustained in a biking accident last week. Bob, who received a B.A. in American Studies this month, served as president of the Williams Outing Club, a junior advisor, an assistant scoutmaster in the Williamstown Boy Scout troop, and a volunteer in the Stamford, VT public schools. A memorial service is being planned and will take place in his hometown, Amherst, New Hampshire, on August 14 (details will be available at my office). Condolences can be sent to Bob’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. James Quay, P.O. Box 729, Amherst, NH 03031.
Nancy A. Roseman
Dean of the College
We would be happy to publish further information as it becomes available.
Praise The Boss
James Lee ‘75 — universisally known as “Jimmy” — got a brief mention in a New York Times article today on the soon-to-be completed merger of JP Morgan Chase and Bank One. Lee is one of the most senior and successful Ephs in finance and seems to play the roll of senior statesman, on occasion, at JP Morgan.
“The guy is a rock star,” said James B. Lee Jr., a vice chairman of J. P. Morgan Chase, as he recounted how Mr. Dimon helped land a big underwriting deal recently, even before the merger becomes official.
Lesson: It never hurts to say nice things about your new boss, especially when the New York Times is calling!
Their dinners finished, Mr. Dimon and Mr. Harrison stepped up to the lectern for a closing interview, conducted by Mr. Lee. “Tell us some personal things about yourselves, Jamie and Bill,” Mr. Lee said.
After a brief pause, Mr. Harrison talked about growing up in North Carolina, coming to New York, all the blind dates he went on before marrying at the age of 42 and how his daughters, 11 and 13, greet him when he arrives home in Greenwich, Conn: “Hey, Billy boy. How were things at the office?”
As the crowd roared with laughter, Mr. Dimon took his turn. He recalled the reaction of the eldest of his three daughters when he told her that he had been fired from Citigroup. “Can I have your cellphone now? I guess you won’t need it,” she said.
Lee is maried to Elizabeth (Brownell) Lee ‘75 (or at least the alumni office has them as residing at the same address). As always, we are big fans of Eph marriages.
Given Lee’s success in finance, he becomes a candidate for the role of mystery donor for the new INSERT YOUR NAME HERE student center. Recall my guess that:
we want a very rich but not shy Williams grad from a not-wealthy family without a history of major gifts to the College, probably not a current trustee, perhaps approaching a major reunion.
Lee and his wife are coming up on their 30th reunion. Investment bankers like Lee are definately not known for their, uh, shyness. It is not clear if Lee is wealthly enough to be able to afford a $15 million donation. His compensation in 1999 (the last that I can find on Bloomberg News) was only $12 million. Then again, he seems to have received a $14 bonus for 2000.
More on Lee can be found here:
James B. Lee, Jr. is Vice Chairman of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Chairman of the Investment Bank, North America. He is responsible for Morgan’s relationships with many of its most important investment banking clients and supervises many of their strategic transactions. He chairs the bank’s Commitment Committee, Conflicts Committee, Executive MBA Program, and its National Advisory Board. He is a member of the Executive Committee, the firm’s policy-making group. He also helped develop and run LeadershipMorganChase, the company’s leadership development initiative.
Mr. Lee joined Chemical in 1975 and held various assignments in specialist lending areas until 1980, when he established and ran Chemical’s merchant bank in Australia. In 1982 he started the bank’s loan syndications unit in New York, and went on to build and run Chemical’s and then Chase Manhattan’s investment banking business. He was named Vice Chairman of the firm in February, 1997.
He was named one of American Banker’s 1992 “Forty Top Bankers under Forty Years of Age.”
In another Williams connection, Lee makes a couple of appearances in Bethany McLean’s ‘92 excellent Enron book, The Smartest Guys in the Room. Lee comes off quite well in a story with very few sympathetic characters. He both sensed early on that everything was not quite right at Enron and, mostly, avoided throwing good money after bad at the end.
Burger Me
Ed Burger is going to be at the Boston Public Library this evening.
If equations make you queasy, this is the lecture for you. Tonight at the Boston Public Library, Edward Burger, a math professor from Williams College, will present a magic show full of illusions — each of which can be unraveled with a simple mathematical concept. The show is geared for people of all ages who love, fear, or hate math. And it’s great for a date, according to Burger. Audience members will leave with a new perspective on math and a free mathematical memento.
Burger was by far one of my favorite profs at Williams… that said – “great for a date”? Come on.
Robert Quay ‘04, RIP
I just received word that Bob Quay passed away in a bike accident on Friday in New Mexico. No other details were available.
Condolences to all.
Ladley ‘96 Hoop Fame
This entry is only for those who think back fondly on high school athletics.
Sean Ladley ‘96 has been named to the Pittsfield basketball Hall of Fame.
“Many of the lessons I learned from my family and from [PHS coach] Dave Harte I’ve been able to carry over into my professional career,” said Ladley, who lives in Charlotte, N.C., and works in the financial industry. “I’ve got great memories from my days at Pittsfield High.”
…
Ladley saw limited varsity time for Williams College under Coach Harry Sheehy — but there are no regrets.
“I loved my time at Williams,” Ladley noted.
Technical Plea to the Masses (not Eph related)
I run a few different blogs and I am posting this comment, or some variation on it, to all of them.
I will make it simple, short, and to the point: If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer – any version – please don’t. Please never open it again. You will do yourself and the world a favor.
CERT has officially asked that everyone use anything to browse the web – just not IE. (CERT is the Computer Emergency Reponse Team – they step in when there is something so bad in software and causing such a global problem that there actually needs to be a group to smack you in the face and say “WTF?! Stop doing that!” – in this case it is over IE)
The options that they recommend:
1) Mozilla / Firefox (both free, the latter being just the browser, the former also being mail and news)
2) Opera (not free, but quite good)
Not only is IE a steaming pile of suck that is opening yourself to viruses and spyware – it also is the bottom of the pile in terms of web standards – it hasn’t been updated in over 5 years (in terms of how it displays pages) and is therefore very far behind.
Most of you viewing this page are using some form of IE, and you really need to stop immediately.
Life According to Williams
If Richard Rodriguez ‘05 kept his dairy of summer time activities on EphBlog, he wouldn’t have these sorts of technical problems. I wonder if the lost post was as good as this one.
Speaking of turning into things, I think I’ve had a mini-epiphany. I feel like since I’m been at Williams I’ve made a number of false starts and screw-ups. let’s call it “growing up” (note to smart-asses: that wasn’t the epiphany). Basically, I don’t know exactly why, and I may look back later on this point in my life as severely wrongheaded, but I feel ready now to put a lot of personal things behind me and forge ahead. Of course, this doesn’t imply a complete gerrymandering of my life-according-to-williams, but it does leave me a lot more free to do what I need . . .
“Gerrymandering of my life-according-to-williams” is a nice way to put it. Just wait till he has a chance to gerrymander his life-according-to-marriage or even gerrymander his life-according-to-children . . .
Eph Hair
Esa Seegulam has some thoughts on ugliness. Alas, they are not nearly as amusing as his previous thoughts on hair.
Baxter Penitentiary Dining Hall, sometime in 2003, I am calmly eating my food. I look across the room to the table where all the track kids are eating. There is a half-Cuban, half-something-else member sitting at the table. I recognize him as a notorious former roommate, code names: Reorge Godriguez, Whore Hay, Havana Banana. He stares threateningly and menacingly, grimacing. I leave without incident. I return to check my AIM and other peoples’ away messages, as I do at ten to the hour, every hour. There is a message waiting. It is from the same Cuban Whore. It says “Lock your door. I am coming for you. I will cut your hair when you are asleep. I will shave you.”
My sources tell me that the Cuban Whore is all talk.
EphBlog MatchMaking
Shimon Rura ‘03 will be in Williamstown on Sunday. Although he is too proud to say so, he clearly needs to be set up with a good Eph woman. Shimon is a nice fellow who will make an excellent husband someday. There are many single Eph women in Williamstown over the summer who would be interested in, say, a nice hike up Pine Cobble on Sunday afternoon with an Eph like Shimon.
Surely we have some readers in Williamstown who can make this happen . . .
Catsam ‘93 with the Po-Mo’s
Derek Catsam ‘93 is spending too much time with the Po-Mo crowd.
At breakfast this morning one of my colleagues was telling a story from one of her classes. Effectively the question on the table in the class related to whether or not it would be right or even acceptable for a man to steal food from another individual in order to feed their family and if someone would be justified in responding with violence in protecting their property. Reasonable issue, reasonable question. Then she told of how one of the women in her class answered with a resounding “No. I’d feel completely justified in shooting them.” This is not an answer I would give, nor one I agree with. But surely a student has the right to say it. My colleague concluded her story with, “I felt as if I had failed her.”
I chimed in at this point – I asked why on earth she had failed a student who decided to make a different judgment than she would as to the issue at hand. She said that it was because the student had given such an “anti-intellectual” argument. She further said that what was most vexing was that she asked the student “Have you ever gone hungry” (the personalization of issues represents a sort of solipsism in the classroom that drives me mad, but never mind that for now) and the student responded (it was nearing 5:00 and class was at an end) “Yes, I’m hungry now.”
Me too. But how are the Red Sox’s doing?
Dunn on Hamilton/Burr
Professor Susan Dunn has some reflections on the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, the 200th anniversary of which is next month. Although the duel predates EphBlog by a bit, there is no doubt that we would have been rooting for Hamilton. Alas, Hamilton lost.
Clapp ‘45, RIP
Charles Clapp ‘45 passed away last week. Clapp was a Navy veteran and had at least 2 of his seven children attend Williams (David Clapp ‘77 and Nancy (Clapp) Kerber ‘87).
Charles E. Clapp II, 80, died peacefully on Wednesday, June 16, 2004, at his home in Duxbury, Mass. He was the husband of Elinor Jones Clapp.
A longtime resident of Providence, Barrington and Duxbury, Judge Clapp served on the Barrington Town Council from 1974 to 1980, including two years as president.
The father of seven children, Judge Clapp also was a partner at the law firm of Edwards & Angell before being appointed to the U.S. Tax Court in 1983 by President Ronald W. Reagan.
Although it is always hard to tell from a distance, he seems to have led a remarkably well-balanced life.
Which Ones
Fascinating article in the New York Times today about race in college admissions. Amherst, but not Williams, gets a mention.
At the most recent reunion of Harvard University’s black alumni, there was lots of pleased talk about the increase in the number of black students at Harvard.
But the celebratory mood was broken in one forum, when some speakers brought up the thorny issue of exactly who those black students were.
While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard’s undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard’s African and African-American studies department, pointed out that the majority of them — perhaps as many as two-thirds — were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.
They said that only about a third of the students were from families in which all four grandparents were born in this country, descendants of slaves. Many argue that it was students like these, disadvantaged by the legacy of Jim Crow laws, segregation and decades of racism, poverty and inferior schools, who were intended as principal beneficiaries of affirmative action in university admissions.
I would imagine that things are unlikely to be different at Williams, but that they are different from the 80’s; there was no SoCa 20 years ago, I think. Finding out the exact facts about Williams — and how/why they have changed over time — would make for a great senior thesis. Indeed, Williams, relative to other elite schools, has a pretty proud heritage in this regard.
The president of Amherst College, Anthony W. Marx, says that colleges should care about the ethnicity of black students because in overlooking those with predominantly American roots, colleges are missing an “opportunity to correct a past injustice” and depriving their campuses “of voices that are particular to being African-American, with all the historical disadvantages that that entails.”
“Overlooking”? Isn’t that a tad misleading? Is Marx really claiming that there are hundreds of high achieving (meaning high SAT scores and high school GPAs with difficult courses) black 18 year olds in America who aren’t actively courted by Amherst (and Harvard and Williams)? That certainly isn’t true.
I suspect that his desire to “correct a past injustice” is probably illegal in the context of Amherst’s admissions policies. It is OK for Amherst to discriminate against, say, Greek-American students as long as the purpose of doing so is to increase diversity in the student body and, therefore, improve the education for all. It is not OK to discriminate in order to make historical redress to 18 year olds that Amherst has not wronged in the past.
But I am not a lawyer.
Your Alumni Fund Donations at Work?
Although it isn’t about Williams specifically, a snippet from a recent Michael Lewis article (on Bloomberg, so no link available) struck me as interesting. The article is about the sad case of Gregory Earls, now convincted of swindling. (Full Disclosure: I knew two of Earls’s children.) Lewis notes that
Ten days ago, the Wall Street Journal published an article about a man named Gregory Earls, who used his role as a prominent fund-raiser for Harvard University to persuade investors to give him money, much of which he stole, the rest he lost in spectacularly sloppy fashion.
Lewis makes the point that it is likely that the same factors that made Earls such a successful fund-raiser for Harvard also provided him with advantages in the swindling game. Any good fundraiser
must have an eye for human weakness. He must know that, while a few good souls may give with no hope of return, most give more shrewdly. They want to impress their old classmates with how much money they are able to give away, for example. Or they want to improve the odds that Harvard will admit their children. Or they want to highlight their affinity with the affinity group.
But here’s the rub: Unless they fork over a sensationally huge pile of dough, donors are unlikely to get anything in return from Harvard. A few thousand bucks is unlikely to impress anyone. Even 50 grand won’t improve their children’s odds. (The Harvard application from the legacy whose parents have given less than millions goes into the same pile as the one from the legacy whose parents have given nothing.) Thus there is a gap in Harvard fund raising between hope and reality, and it is the job of the fund-raiser to bridge it.
My question: Is the same true at Williams? I realize that the really big-money givers are in a separate category from the rest of us. But I would have guessed that the admissions office would be more kindly disposed to children of Ephs that are at least somewhat active — give a little money regularly, attend reunions, volunteer and so on — than toward the children of Ephs who have done nothing Williams related since graduation day.
Or am I being naive?
Burns ‘39 Channels Reagan
It is nice to know that Political Science Professor James MacGregor Burns ‘39 can tell what Ronald Reagan would have thought about the the proposal to put him [Reagan, not Burns] on the dime.
James MacGregor Burns, a Williams College professor and noted FDR biographer, said: “I may not have agreed with Ronald Reagan on very much, but I liked him as a person. However, you display a real ignorance about Ronald Reagan if you think that he would support any attack on the memory of FDR, who Reagan regarded as a personal hero. Even after becoming a conservative Republican, Reagan remained a huge fan of President Roosevelt. I simply refuse to believe that Ronald Reagan would countenance the removal of FDR from the dime to make way for his own image. In short, he would be horrified by this idea.”
More info here.
It’s funny but I can’t recall Jim Burns saying that he “liked him as a person” about Reagan in the late 80’s, but I guess that we all mellow with age.
Opera at Chapin?
A remarkable amount of stuff goes on in Williamstown over the summer. My favorite:
The Berkshire Opera Company will bring two performances of Rigoletto to Chapin Hall on July 2 and July 4 with an estimated attendance of 500 people.
More info here.
Any undergrad Eph who doesn’t spend at least one summer in Williamstown is missing out on a nice time.
Tetragrammaton
Blog discussions that use the word “Nazi” are generally best avoided, but there is some interesting back and forth going on between Rolando Garcia ‘02 and Joseph Shoer ‘06.
The best writing, however, comes from a student whose nom-de-blog is “Schopenhauer? I don’t even know her!”
A comparison between two things only needs the two things to be similar in a relevant way for the comparison to be legitimate. If I wish to explain how beautiful a woman is, and I compare her to Aphrodite, I’m not saying that the woman in question emerged mysterious from the sea, or that she can sometimes be found standing on an enormous scallop shell. I am saying that, limiting the discussion to *beauty*, the woman is comparable to Aphrodite. If this were not how comparisons worked, then we could compare things only to themselves, and we would learn nothing.
Likewise, when Joseph compares the “we were only following orders” defense to that used by the Nazis at Nuremburg, he’s not saying that the soldiers invovled were anti-Semitic or genocidal or fascist any more than he’s saying that they spoke German as a native language, were born in the 1910s and 20s, etc. He’s showing how the defense of the torturers at Abu Ghraib is comparable to another defense that we all rightly acknowledge to be morally bankrupt.
Is there anyway, outside of the Williams system, to determine who this student is? In any event, Garcia responds to this with:
Look, I understand how from a purely intellectual and rhetorical point your argument for the validity of the comparison is undeniable. But you are illustrating what continually upsets me about the blogs on this website: you apply these arguments that are intellectually sound without considering the reality of the situation. When reality is inconsistent with intellectual logic (which, outside of intellectual institutions is a frightening large amount of the time) both need to be taken into account.
Note that this is a recurring theme in disputes at Williams and elsewhere. On the one hand, it would be nice if we could all sit on the log together and discuss, cooly and rationally and honestly, everything under the sun. On the other hand, there are certain topics that are, for some of us, beyond the pale.
The real problems arise when some Ephs don’t realize that other Ephs think that topic X or metaphor Y is not something that should ever be mentioned.
For the most part, EphBlog sides with Schopenhauer in this debate. We talk about everything. But that means that the onus is even more so on us to be sensitive to the viewpoints of those Ephs who find the subjectives that we address offensive.
ABC on Hoxsey Street
Sad to read that
Dana and Judy Danforth are retiring after 23 years as resident directors for the Greylock A Better Chance (ABC) program, years in which they provided encouragement, guidance, patience, structure and above all, friendship to successive waves of teenagers in the ABC House at 58 Hoxsey St.
Steve Rogers ‘79 (and current trustee) was one of
[M]ore than 50 students who have graduated from Mount Greylock Regional High School through the ABC program, which brings academically promising, primarily minority students, mostly from inner-city neighborhoods, to more academically rigorous high schools.
The entire article, like most things in iBerkshires, is worth a read. Note that there are many connections between ABC and Williams. Director of Public Affairs Jim Kolesar ‘72 is co-President of the ABC Board and notes that
the challenges of living with eight teenagers requires a very intense commitment, and it’s an enormous tribute to the Danforths that they stayed at it for so long.
“They’re unbelievable,” Kolesar said. “Twenty-three years is a record quite unlikely to be broken. They’re a very important part of the Greylock ABC program. Setting a strong foundation at the house enables our students to grow academically and personally. And they do hear back from graduates who express enormous gratitude that they admit they weren’t always able to express at the time.”
My own daughters, even at ages 5 and 8, seem to have similar gratitude-expression problems. If I am lucky, they’ll be saying similarly nice things about me 23 years from now . . .
Two philanthropy hits for EphBlog
First up, Dave’s post about the “mystery” alum who donated a bunch of money ($15.75M) is being discussed over at this blog.
While it doesn’t give us any hints as to who it would be that donated the money, it does ask (albeit rhetorically it appears) where “Eph” originates from.
The next hit on the web for us is that George W. Bush (I hear he’s president of some “United States” country these days) has made “philanthropist, entrepreneur” Bonnie McElveen-Hunter, chair of the Red Cross.
The article states (right at the end) that McElveen-Hunter and her attorney husband have a 21 year old son at Williams in his senior year.
Both of these really have me caught off guard. It is so rare to find alumni that donate massive amounts of money, and we hardly ever have students with parents that are high ranking and influential.
A welcome change I say.
Williamstown == Manhattan?
As much as we all love the Purple Valley, these are the sorts of comparisons that we rarely come across.
After a massive renovation, Mass MoCA opened in 1999, and its thousands of visitors — 120,000 last year — have helped to reverse the trend toward morbidity in North Adams. The town is slowly becoming hip, a kind of Brooklyn to Williamstown’s Manhattan.
Yeah, right. Manhattan.
Mass MoCA is not a museum like most museums. It’s more like a spa, a place you go for a while to immerse yourself in beauty and from which you emerge, a few hours later, rejuvenated.
Sounds good to me. And also much more reasonably priced than, say, Canyon Ranch.
In any event, Joe Thompson ‘81 has done an amazing job at Mass MoCA.
That Mass MoCA exists is a miracle. The 13-acre, 27-building, 780,000 square-foot complex was until 1985 the Sprague Electric Company, North Adams’ flagship employer. When Sprague closed, the dead brick campus became a symbol of North Adams’ postindustrial malaise.
Joseph C. Thompson, then at the Williams College Museum of Art and now Mass MoCA’s director, saw possibility in Sprague’s absence. He helped to launch an implausible campaign to convert the space into a world-class museum of contemporary art.
In 1988 the Massachusetts legislature, implausibly, allocated $35 million to the project. In 1991 the funds were frozen by Governor Weld, however, and released in part only in 1995 after Thompson had managed to demonstrate his seriousness by raising more than $8 million in private donations.
Why not Thompson as Commencement speaker in ‘06, timed to coincide with his 25th year reunion? I’d wager that his speech would be interesting and — dare I wish for it? — original to the occasion.
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