Anchor Housing Round Up
Here is a listing of all the major posts related to anchor housing, with updates as needed.
- The CUL Report itself has many, many flaws. Consider its use of the phrase “The Williams House System“. Note its inaccurate description of the end of the affiliation era. Consider its faulty reasoning with regard to student autonomy, the rise of free agency and the decrease in diversity. Beware of what the future holds for co-ops and intramurals.
- We have speculated on the motivation for anchor nousing and provided thoughts on the Record coverage of the debate. We have praised and damned College Council.
- We have considered the implications for JA selection and even run some simulations. Entries are not effected by the current plan, but don’t think that they won’t be in the future.
- We have covered much of the history of housing at Williams from the 80’s through the 2002 CUL, the origin of anchors to recent “reforms”. We highlighted the view from 1998 and gathered some of the history with respect to snow scuplures and trivia.
- We have hosted debates on housing from the reality of the affiliation system to the fundamental assumptions and the Davis Conjecture.
- With Anchors Away, We helped organize a letter (pdf and html) to the Trustees.
- We have given lots of advice to those involved with the debate on campus. Although EphBlog has been firmly in the anti-anti-free-agency camp, we had these suggestions for the anchorites. But most advice has gone to the forces aligned against anchor housing: Fight the Power I, II, III, IV, and V.
IT Tremor
The college’s IT infrastructure took an uncertainty hit this week with the announcement that SunGard Data Systems was being purchased for $11.3 billion. A SunGard division, SunGard BSR, supplies the systems that the college uses to track alumni giving and power the alumni directory on Ephnet. This is the second IT uncertainty tremor to hit the college within the past several months. In December, Oracle completed its takover of PeopleSoft, the company that sells the software Williams uses to run the college (Admissions, class registration, financials, HR, etc.)
Connors ‘85 Finishes Isreali Jail Stint
Patrick Connors, a.k.a. Patrick O’Connor, visited the Greenwich Citizen offices Saturday and told how it feels to be out of an Israeli jail where he had been detained for three weeks and one day.
I believe that this story is about Patrick Connors ‘85. Wild stuff. Would make for an interesting Record article or Gaudino Forum event.
HTML tutorial
Over Winter Study I taught a course on HTML. For all of you who wonder how Dave gets his quoted paragraphs offset and turned yellow, or how he links to other pages, or how Aidan makes people’s names bold, or how I post pictures — or if (gasp) you want to make a Web page of your own — well, I have written a tutorial for you. The Internet already provides many HTML tutorials, but none (at least, none that I have found) that concisely guide you from not knowing anything about HTML to having a page with just about anything you want on it.
Here is my HTML tutorial. Go forth and do good.
I realize that many Ephs already know HTML, and for those who do, the contents of this tutorial will seem obvious. But HTML is easy enough to learn that I think it is useful to know it, since most of us use the Internet daily, and it is nice to know the structure of the Internet: just how it is that the page you’re reading got to look that way (though EphBlog is more complex than basic HTML). Dreamweaver may be easy, but it creates ugly code, and it reveals nothing of the inner workings of the Internet. For that, you need HTML. Here it is.
Letter from Iraq Part XVI
I haven’t been posting letters from Felipe recently because he hasn’t been writing. Fear not. Felipe is (relatively) safe and sound, and wrote a lengthy missive recounting some of his activities.
Highlights include:
1) Offering up advice to people important enough to act upon it;
2) Hanging out on top of a HumVee with a giant machine gun (no more ambushes reported);
3) Smoking apple tobacco from a hooka in Qatar;
4) Cross cultural karaoke.
Hang in there, Felipe. We’re still pulling for you (and eagerly awaiting your next installment).
my b
Samuel Peckham ‘07 starts off mean, goes to classy, but, in the end, won’t go away.
Gerrard in NYT
Philosophy Professor Steven Gerrard had a letter in the New York Times.
To the Editor:
Defenders of our government’s displaying the Ten Commandments face a religious dilemma. If the Ten Commandments are worth publicly displaying, then they are religious; it is their religious meaning that gives them their significance. Otherwise, secular formulations like Kant’s categorical imperative or John Stuart Mill’s greatest happiness principle would do.
If, however, the Ten Commandments are secular, then they are stripped of any special power and are not worth the fuss.
Regardless of the legal issues involved, a government display of the Ten Commandments strips them of their religious power and should be opposed for religious reasons.
Steven Gerrard
Williamstown, Mass.
March 2, 2005
The writer is a professor of philosophy and chairman of Jewish studies at Williams College.
Is this really a dilemma? One could argue that the Ten Commandments are worth publicly displaying because of their historical significance to American history and law. I don’t care much either way, but, like any good radical anti-Federalist, am happy to let the nice people in Alabama display what they want as long as they don’t try to tell me and my Massachusetts friends what we must or must not display.
Photo ID, #9
Here we go again.
Your job is to tell:
(a) Where this picture was taken;
(b) Any memories you have of this object.
Modest Involvement
Emeritus Professor of Economics Dick Sabot was kind enough to send in these comments on the faculty handbook’s prohibition of anything more than “modest involvement” in paid outside employment. I was curious if he knew of where/when the guideline arose. I asked him because, besides being my professor, he was a founder of Tripod, the Eph-face of the dot.com boom.
Eric Cohen Op-Ed
Eric Cohen ‘99 has an article in the Weekly Standard on the Terri Schiavo situation. Cohen, editor of the fascinating journal The New Atlantis, talked to Scattershot last spring about the moral dilemmas technology forces society to grapple with.
Goldwarg ‘03 on Gay Althletes
Jordan Goldwarg ‘03 co-founded and runs Discourse, a web site devoted to gay athletes.
As a forum for gay people and sport, Discourse encourages all individuals with an interest in this subject to contribute their thoughts, in writing, about any aspect of what it means to be a gay athlete, coach, trainer, spectator, or scholar.
Discourse intends to examine the current climate of sport at every level and to bring about change through challenging discussions and the dissemination of ideas. We believe that to solve the problems that face GLBT people who participate in sport, and to gain real acceptance, it is necessary to have an ongoing and in-depth dialogue, maintained by the athletes and participants themselves. Discourse is primarily for athletes, current and former, competitive and recreational.
His story about coming out at Williams is nice read, reflecting well on the College, the ski team and him.
Dunn on Jefferson in Time
Professor Susan Dunn has some interesting thoughts on Thomas Jefferson in this week’s issue of Time.
Jefferson believed in the transparency of government. He was the only one of the Founding Fathers who thought that the Constitutional Convention of 1787 should have been open to the public. He believed that ideas should circulate, not be discussed in secrecy.
EphBlog heartily agrees. A different contributor to the same forum argues that Jefferson:
maintained a decades-long concubinage with his slave Sally Hemings, fathered several illegitimate children with her who consequently became his property . . .
As discussed here, I am suspicious of this claim.
A Cartoonist Mafia?
Following up on Alix’s recent post, how many Williams alums are cartoonists? The three I know of are Dorothy Gambrell ‘00, author of Cat and Girl; Justin Borus ‘98, co-creator of Girls & Sports, and Chan Lowe ‘75, an editorial cartoonist at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
Are there others? Has Williams created a “Cartoonist Mafia”? At least we appear to be ahead of Yale, which claims Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury fame.
2005 CUL Report
I have received hundreds of e-mails asking for further commentary on anchor housing. Really. In the meantime, I would urge all interested Ephs to read the CUL Report for themselves. Although I have provided my fair share of criticisms, it is still well worth a read. You can find a nice pdf version here, with some very useful appendices. This version is much easier to read then the one published by the Record, especially since the Record’s website seems to be on spring break. I suspect that it is just an html error that the report is not linked to from the main CUL page.
C3D Case Study
Economics Professor Steve Sheppard is quoted in an Eagle article on the Berkshire economy.
Puppies
Karen Lichtman draws an analogy between puppies and WSO e-mail users.
Folks who want to influence the administration on this one should reach out (politely!) to Steve Birrell ‘64, vice president for alumni relations and development. No one is more interested than he in seeing to it that alumni have a reason to feel connected to Williams every day for the rest of their lives.
Foosball
Adrian Martinez ‘06 deserves major credit for setting up a campus wide foosball latter. Why didn’t Gargoyle take care of this years ago?
Lest cranky alums think this a waste of time, I can only note that several of my Carter House bretheren were ace foosball players back in the day, including Mark Solan ‘88. Mark went on to win an Emmy, albeit not in foosball, so I am sure that this generation of foosball Ephs are also destined for greatness.
Blame Hank Payne
Things are getting desparate for the users of WSO e-mail. For the record, I’ll note that I suggested to Hank Payne a decade ago that Williams provide lifetime e-mail service for alumni. Every moment that an alum thinks or writes or reads “Williams,” the likelihood of giving to the College increases.
The fact that Payne (after, I think, answering politely) failed to follow up is further evidence, as if more were needed, that my long term record of ineffectual attempts to influence policy at Williams is probably peerless. Just so you know.
Williams: 2,000 Out of 100,000 Out of 14 Million
Andrew Delbanco has written an interesting article in the New York Review of Books entitled, Colleges: An Endangered Species? In the course of referring to a variety of books — Stover at Yale, by Owen Johnson; The Future of the Public University in America: Beyond the Crossroads, by James J. Duderstadt and Farris W. Womack; The Uses of the University, by Clark Kerr; and Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education, by David L. Kirp — he gives a succinct history of higher education in America.
At one point he notes,
The leading liberal arts colleges will doubtless survive, but they belong to an endangered species. Michael S. McPherson, president of the Spencer Foundation and former president of Macalester College, and Morton O. Schapiro, president of Williams, report that even now “the nation’s liberal arts college students would almost certainly fit easily inside a Big Ten football stadium: fewer than 100,000 students out of more than 14 million.”[10] In today’s educational landscape, barely one sixth of all college students fit the traditional profile of full-time residential students between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. One third of American undergraduates now work full-time, and more than half attend college part-time, typically majoring in subjects with immediate utility, such as accounting or computing.
Which makes Williams a very rare experience indeed.
Never Too Fast
Nice article on Phi Beta Kappa and Cross Country All American Jenn Campbell ‘05.
“She’s a 12-time All-American,” fellow Williams senior Katie Marsh said, “but she never had that mindset. She is so humble. She was never too fast to run with someone.”
“Never too fast to run with someone.” What a marvelous turn of phrase. Every athlete is familar with the teammate who is as eager to help her peers to succeed as she is to succeed herself. Campbell seems like that sort of person. I hope that the same will be said of my daughters in the years to come.
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