Wed 10 Aug 2005
Williams needs to facilitate the formation and maintenance of EphCOI (rhymes with thief-boy), Williams-connected Communities of Interest.
Basic idea is that there are large numbers of Ephs (students, alumni, professors and staff) with interests in specific fields and endeavors. One example is Ephs in Entertainment.
It began as a happy accident. In March 2002, screenwriter B. Daniel Blatt ‘85 organized a dinner for Ephs after a New England Small Colleges function for Los Angeles-area alumni trying to break into show business. When nearly two dozen Williams alumni and friends crammed around a long table at a North Hollywood restaurant and stayed until closing to exchange e-mail addresses and business leads, Blatt knew he was on to something. Thus began Ephs in Entertainment, a drinking club with a networking problem.
The whole article makes for a fun read. The problem, though, is that there is no way for Ephs who don’t live in LA to participate. While there is a lot to be said for getting together over dinner, there should also be an EphCOI devoted to the entertainment business that would feature links to news articles, discussion of current events, advice for job-seekers, internship opportunities and so on. The same applies for Ephs in Finance, Ephs in the Law, Ephs in Football, Ephs in Cartooning, Ephs in et cetera.
Now, it is true that the College tries to facilitate some of this via alumni communities of various sorts, but, as best I can tell, these aren’t very successful. Does anyone use them? The main problem, I suspect, is that no one is going to bother with a resource that requires a login and password. (What percentage of alumni ever login to any part of the Alumni Society’s site?) Moreover, as best I can tell, all the alumni resources are essentially cut off from the worlds of current undergraduates. The real value (and fun) of something like Ephs in Finance would come from the interactions between alumni and students.
It would also be helpful to get faculty involved. Perhaps the single most famous and successful example of Eph networking is the famous Art History Mafia, which was centered around Williams faculty.
Another natural realm for such a community involves academic advising.
Simple outline is to create department centered teams of people who would gather information about that department, provide a FAQ and answer questions. For the most part, one students plus one alum would be all that you really need. There can’t be more than a few thousand words worth of things that students need to know about, say, the Political Science department.
These posts could all be categorized to make it easy for someone to pull up the collected wisdom of the participants about, say, Art History.
The College (as well as the Gargoyles) have recently worked on academic advising, just as they worked on it 20 years ago. None of the proposed solutions seem that useful. None use technology that wasn’t available when my father was at Williams five decade ago. Unless and until the collective wisdom of Ephdom is gathered together and made accessible (and interactive), academic advising will be sub-optimal.
What sort of tools do EphCOI require? Nothing fancy. Everything could be done with a blog, even within EphBlog, but it would be nice for someone else to take on the leadership role here. What is Gargoyle working on in 2005-2006? I suspect that the nice folks at WSO would be willing to help out. Even the College itself, perhaps under the leadership of OCC or the Alumni Society, will provide a rallying point.
But whatever the details, I would recommend that certain principals apply. First, the site (blog, webpage, wiki, whatever) must be open. People can’t be bothered to login. Second, the site must solicit feedback and material from both undergraduates and alums and, ideally, faculty. Third, specific volunteers will need to take responsibility for their EphCOI. I would certainly be happy enough to volunteer to help with Ephs in Finance and academic advising in Economics. And there are hundreds of alums like me who would be just as eager to participate.
EphCOI. You read it here first.
August 10th, 2005 at 10:32 am
I just tried to post a comment and received the error, “Your comment was denied for questionable content.” Just being my usual long-winded self — no swear words, no URLs. What gives?
August 10th, 2005 at 12:08 pm
This is the second example that we have had along these lines. It is not you or your computer. There seems to be some weird Movable Type problem that we are having. Suggestions appreciated.
August 10th, 2005 at 12:47 pm
This concept is not new to the college, as I’ve been involved in such discussions since I’ve been an Alumni Fund Vice Chair, which is about four years now.
The reason the college hasn’t moved as fast as you would like on this (and probably never will), is for a long list of reasons.
First, colleges and universities as a group are not as aggressive at using the Web, IT systems, etc. as commercial businesses. They invest lest money in it (colleges generally spend 4% of their budget on IT; some banks spend 15%) and their IT departments have less depth. While I believe other colleges are using the Web better than Williams (Carleton springs to mind), Williams is comfortably above the average of its peers.
Second, Williams alumni span a number of generations and have very different perceptions of IT and online communities. They fall into three general groups: (1) Digital Strangers, (2) Digital Immigrants, and (3) Digital Natives. Digital Strangers are retirees, those who spent most of their adult life not using computers. A lot of them don’t have e-mail and consider computers and the Web off-putting. Digital Immigrants is my generation, the Baby Boomers, who were introduced to computers during their working life. Here, attitudes run the gamut, from people like me who work in high tech, to others who are flummoxed by it. For example, this summer, before my 35th reunion, I had to send instructions to one of my classmates on how to print out a Web page on the Class of ‘75 Web site (First you go to File, then Print…,). Digital Natives are those who grew up with PCs, laptops, MP3 players, and the Internet, and live in online worlds such as TheFacebook.com. Given this dynamic, it’s a timing problem for the college — the heavy hitters who give 10s of millions of dollars aren’t looking for electronic communities. They might be 10 years from now, but not yet.
This brings me to the third point, which is there’s a wide range of Williams connectedness. Some alums want to forget the place; most have fond memories, especially around reunion; and a small percentage bleed purple. While Ephblog may seem like the center of the world to you, there’s probably at most several hundred hard core (daily) readers of it. Generously assuming there are 1,000 hard core Ephblogists[?], that’s still only 4% of the alumni body. So while you may be vocal, you aren’t the majority.
Fourth, the administration and alumni working in Williamstown don’t experience the need to be electronically connected. They walk down Spring Street, meet at the Faculty Club, and are instantly connected. At a gut level, spending tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on electronic infrastructure for alumni to be “better connected” seems unnecessary, if not irresponsible.
Fifth, the college’s mission is centered around its students, not its alumni. Yes, keeping the alumni happy is important since disgruntled alumni will (1) tarnish the Williams brand and steer students good away and (2) give less money. However, when all is said and done, if Williams has an incremental $100,000 to spend, it’s more inclined to spend it on academics/campus rather than alumni systems. Academic/campus spending is clear and visible. For example, Middlebury built a highly successful student union and Williams had to respond in kind. However, colleges, prospective students, and U.S. News find it (1) difficult to compare alumni support infrastructure and (2) frankly, give it a lower priority than small classes and a well-groomed campus.
Sixth, in the grand scheme of higher education, Williams does a pretty good job of staying connected with its alumni. Alumni Fund giving is relatively high, the Climb Far campaign is doing better than forecast, alumni come back to reunion in droves. My wife went to Suffolk University and it does a dismal job of helping alumni stay connected to the university and each other. Given Suffolk’s position, it would find it necessary to throw money and infrastructure at the problem; Williams isn’t in such dire straits and doesn’t see it as a crisis.
Now, after giving six reasons why the college won’t move as quickly as you would like, let me state that I wish the college would move quicker. I think there are clouds on the horizon. Students who walk around with about 2 GB of memory on their person (between laptops, PDAs, and MP3 players) are not going to view a paper Alumni Review sent out four times a year as the center of their Williams alumni universe. Steve Birrell and the staff at the Alumni Office have heard me (and other Vice Chairs) say this multiple times. The idea is not foreign to them. But at this moment in time, in the middle of the Climb Far campaign — for some odd reason — Steve Birrell and company are more focused on hitting aggressive fund raising numbers than pondering electronic communities. And I would bet that Steve’s priorities mirror Morty’s in this regard.
So I think we will eventually get to the world you envision; but don’t hold your breath.
August 10th, 2005 at 12:53 pm
Well, after some of Eric Smith’s magic I got my comment posted. See above. However, my math is off; I attended my 30th Reunion this year, not my 35th.
August 10th, 2005 at 1:27 pm
Just to be clear, I am not proposing that the College spend 100k on anything. Indeed, at most I would like to see the College be supportive of these efforts, perhaps provide some hosting, maybe get some of their IT folk involved. Too much of the IT budget/time of the Alumni Society goes toward material that stays hidden in some place that almost no one looks at it. (Of course, some of that material, like the Alumni Directory, needs to stay hidden.)
Also, the main point of EphCOI, broadly understood, is not to help out alums. Indeed, there is no meaninful benefit to alums of better academic advising. Now, it is true that alums who participate in a business-related EphCOI might benefit from it, but I think that current students would benefit from it just as much if not more so.
The quantity and quality of the advice that current students receive about their future careers could be an order of magnitude better than it currently is because there is such a wealth of uptapped alumni expertise and knowledge. Note that this is not a criticism of OCC. They do as much as they can with the resources that they have. I just think that so much more could be done with alumni involvement. The natural way to organize and structure that involvement would be via industry.
Consider the case of the 25 (?) members of the class of 2006 who are considering careers in the software industry. I think that there are a lot of alums out there who could give these young Ephs some excellent advice and I think that these Ephs would be eager to read that advice. What we have, currently, is a market failure in which the two groups are not put in contact with each other.
August 10th, 2005 at 7:40 pm
Well, the college is supportive, as long as it doesn’t cost anything or put the college at risk. The college loves the fact that I maintain a class Web site and complements me from time to time on it. However, will they host it? No, they don’t have the budget or personnel for that added burden and don’t want to be legally responsible if the site goes down. Will they pay for the hosting? No, since I seem so eager to do it, I can pay for it, or arrange for my class to pay for it.
True, that attitude is changing, and the college is in the process of making it easier for classes, especially the younger classes, to put up a class Web site, but Williams hasn’t yet embraced spending a chunk of change to offer class sites as a service, like Harvard has.
In reading your post, I missed your emphasis on advising. Williams uses the term communities of interest for affinity groups, those wanting to stay connected because they knew each other in college (e.g., football players), and I leapt to the conclusion that your meaning was the same.
The current informal method sort of works. I get calls and e-mails a couple of times a month from alums who found my name on some advising list that Williams has. If I’m not swamped I usually reply. However, the appreciation quotient seems sort of low. Several weeks ago I arranged to meet an unemployed alum in Boston to talk about the marketing sector and he stood me up (we later talked on the phone); I sent a job lead to a current student and although he read the e-mail (I got the return receipt) he never sent a quick thank you.
If somebody’s desperate to network they’ll figure out how to do it (look in the Alumni Directory, join Linked In). I’m not sure we need to lead the horses to water.
August 10th, 2005 at 10:45 pm
“The college loves the fact that I maintain a class Web site and complements me from time to time on it.”
How lucky you are! Although many college officials have kindly and patiently answered my questions, I can’t recall the last time someone complimented EphBlog. Not that I am complaining or anything.
“Williams uses the term communities of interest for affinity groups”. Are these used much? Just curious. I think that whatever efforts the College currently devoted to this would be better spent outside of the firewall of the Alumni site. If, on the other hand, the current set of affinity groups is even partially successful, then things are working well enough as is.
Your experience with alumni advising is similar to mine. Indeed, perhaps the main goal of EphCOI will be to teach people to send thank you e-mails! Why is that so hard?
Leading recalcitrant horses to water and then turning on the fire hose is, obviously, EphBlog gospel.
August 13th, 2005 at 11:46 pm
David,
Thank you for bringing up a topic that has been on my mind for well more than a decade. Among the projects on my desktop was my own personal history of electronic communities at Williams, which is slowly turning into a long-term analysis. I consider myself a sort of lower disciple of Ted Nelson, who coined the term “hypertext,” and uses the line “the Web was what we were trying to prevent” everytime he drops by the house. Like your coverage of McIntosh, you’ve touched on one of the topics of which Mr. Uible would call me “intimately interested.”
To answer your question, no, no one seems to use the Williams lists. I’m signed up for most of them, both out of interest and out of the fact that large parts of my life are spent not knowing what city I’ll be in in three weeks, and there’s no traffic.
They are simply ineffective, poorly done, and a result of near-zero understanding of what is to be accomplished, much less how. Who is going to use a contact system that begins emails with a paragraph of disclaimers? It is off-putting, wastes people’s time and simply ineffective.
There are ways to design things, and ways not to. Another associate of mine, Jef Raskin, wrote the “The Humane Interface,” a volumne which anyone interested in designing effective human commications of any kind should read. My point in mentioning it is that Williams, at all levels, lacks the kind of expertise and perspective that Jef’s work represents. Outside Comp Sci, I don’t know anyone at Williams who even knows what Human Interface Design is, and that is a serious historical flaw in how Williams has developed. And lacking anyone who has even a basic sense of how to design and implement such things, moreover lacking anyone who has much of a sense that such expertise even exists, Williams has done nothing of significance to develop such communications in over a decade, much to my frustration.
In counterpoint to this stands the fact, that if Williams had an even minimally effective system to connect itself to its alums, it could draw on their expertise to better itself– something that it in fact has done rather well over its history, and on which any institution depends. On the specific point of IT, I will not hesitate to say that Williams’ IT personnel are frankly and simply third-rate; many of its students, much less its alums, are first-rate, some of them crucial innovators in the field. That is a dangerous dynamic in which Williams personel will not stand aside and let students or alums innovate and get the job done– a dynamic that extends far outside IT matters.
Harvard, Stanford and MIT have had alumni publications and functions online for most of the previous decade; I’ve read their alum publications with friend’s logins whenever I could, and because I could. Williams has had .pdfs of the Review online for only a very short time. How much effort does it take to generate a .pdf in Acrobat Distiller, put it in a directory and make a link to it?
Communications technologies are an absolutely integral part of the economic changes which are consuming our world. To use an example I read earlier this week, a district manager can now land in rural Oregon, sync her email and laptop databases with current reports from subordinates, see which of them are currently available, review scheduling and issues on the way to a meeting at the regional office, and use the time remaining to communicate updates and resolve issues before arriving.
If Williams isn’t fully preparing its students for that reality– which is now, not the future– it is hampering or crippling their future abilities. I ashamed to look at Darmouth and compare the tech experience it is giving its students’ to Williams. I am ashamed to compare Williams to George Mason or San Francisco State.
Looking at second- and third-tier institutions, many are far ahead of Harvard etc because they are not stuck in previous patterns of behavior, and fully committed to leveraging their assets to build the best possible education for their students. I can tell you that Western Kentucky– an institution that I am personally committed to turning into a first-tier– is fully committed to connecting to its alumni and tapping them for everything they can give to the institution, to current students, and to each other. This ranges from pure fundraising to creating working groups of alums, faculty and students who work collectively on development projects.
WKU’s IT Stategic Operations Plan, like those of many similar institutions, is a result of examining available technologies, possibilities and the plans of many institutions– not only “comparables,” but those in very different positions. It reflects an absolute committment to employing technology to better education in every sense– not only of students currently on campus, but the ongoing education of its alums and the good of every community which WKU impacts– from local to regional to nation to globe.
In comparison, Williams seems to be sitting and waiting, at best. Guy seems to be saying that the involved parties in IT and elsewhere at Williams are so harried– or so incapable– that they can’t take take such an overarching look at the situation, and direct their efforts appropriately. I expect more.
As usual, more later. I’m going to make some rather blunt responses to Guy’s post now.
August 14th, 2005 at 12:45 am
Guy,
I appreciate your comments and perspective. However, I’m going to start by saying that I am fundamentally opposed to the essential direction and implication of what you report. As a sort of expert in this area– both in some of the innovations that have popped up at Williams over time, and in the larger field of electronic communications, I certainly should and will take the time to explore the many issues here with far more precision later.
But I would like to make some rather pointed comments at this point.
Again, I respect and appreciate much that is done in alumni development, and many people I’ve met there– to a point. In some ways, I certainly “bleed Purple.” But equally I sometimes wonder what is going on in the heads of people on Park Street any elsewhere– and how connected they are to the rest of the world.
Sometime in ‘97, I was visiting campus and standing in front of Currier. I spoke to a woman who was a sophomore, and she told me frankly that she couldn’t imagine any reason why I would come back to campus. She hated being at Williams.
That moment, and her frank language, coalesced a disturbing impression I had during those years– that a large number of the students I met didn’t like their Williams experience, at best. I still meet with students of those years in New York and Boston and Chicago, and they tell me how glad they are not to be at Williams and how much personal growth they’ve had since leaving.
For me, returning and remaining connected to Williams was a part of my continued development and growth, both personally and intellectually. This is also a story to be told more fully elsewhere, but my continued connection both supplemented my undergrad education at Williams– and gave me the opportunity to bring the thoughts and ideas occurring at Berkeley and apply them at Williams, not to mention mentor Williams students in a manner that several older Williams students and then-recent alums had mentored me.
Does anyone involved in administration, much less IT, notice that such things go on?[*] As far as I can tell from conversations with alums twenty and thirty and forty years my senior, such interactions are–or were– critical to the [multigenerational] process[es] of [learning at] Williams and many other institutions.
Returning to the above, a few months after my conversation with the young woman, the Boston Globe published an article on the increasing negative sentiment of current students and recent alums towards their Colleges and especially [towards]alum relations– sentiments which the Glob frankly reported as feeling alum relations were a bunch of money-diggers unconcerned with student life or the alums. The article profiled Boston College and Brandeis, interviewed alum relations officers and administrators at both, and outlined the substantive changes both were taking [to address the misperception].
At the time and since, I’ve been unable to effectively raise the topic with anyone other than profs at Williams, and seen no indication whatsoever that anyone in alum relations has any idea that this is even a problem. And it is. And I’ll underline a related point– many professors (as well as students) understand this and many other issues crucial to Williams. In no way does Williams’ governance capitalize on this; rather the ineffectiveness of governance [mechanisms ultimately] frustrates them into resentiment and indifference. We’re back to Anchor Housing!
WRT the specific issue of online– not Web!– communities, and the mention of a $100K “incremental increase” to achieve them:
First, and like so often, this is not primarily a money problem. It is an innovation problem. If only a small group at Williams had a sense of the issue(s) and what was going on, neither alum online communities nor real support for class sites would be a problem nor [represent] a [substantive incremental cost [(versus benefit].
Second, and [via] somewhat more long-winded [examples], it is hard for me to swallow the $100K figure given that Williams is an institution that exercises such little effective financial control.
In 1989, the Personnel Manual for the Telluride Association– which ran a summer program and had other relations with Williams due to Steve Fix [etc]– had a specific section which directed Associates on how to get specific pricing for anything they did in connection with Williams. It said in “no uncertain terms” that Williams sources materials and services with no regard for cost. In the fifteen years since, I’ve seen similar [if toned down] instructions repeated in personnel manuals at two other entities that occasionally contract through Williams.
Specifically in IT, in ‘95-97, I contracted at BBN Planet, which was then providing Williams with Internet connectivity. As I am no longer under NDA with them, it is fair for me to reveal that Williams paid 50% or more over market rate for those services, a fact that was more than well-known at BBN, not to mention something I was actively teased about. In the past decade, Williams has spent well more than a million dollars more than necessary on connectivity alone; I also knew people at DEC, who did Williams’ library systems, and Williams was reamed there as well. (Not to mention the system didn’t give us the power of stuff installed at state colleges for a tenth the price, a fact I knew at the time it was installed.) I could go on. The bottom line is that Williams is sorely lacking in critical operating knowledge in areas such as IT, and few at Williams seem to know how to negotiate price– or even that you should. The institution often spends money like some of its more spoiled students, a fact that I [see no reason to] conceal I have a long-term peeve about.
These are also issues that I’ve tried to raise many times, and again to be frank, ones for which I’ve received more than off-putting responses from members of the administration and staff. I will push the bounds of modesty to mention that Bill Joy– a founder and director of Sun Microsystems– was a long-term friend of my housemates in San Fransico, and occasional visitor. Whatever I feel towards Williams, I’m not going to waste my time being condescended to by anyone in Jesup.
My counter-point, indelicately put among all this indelicacy, is that with a little involvement from alumni Williams would, at the very least, have some comparitive pricing data and actual perspective in sourcing and negotiating its contracts; in a grander scheme, it would also have access to a wealth of resources to better itself, its students’ education, and the good of its alums and its society.
It is also worth pointing out that I feel I can communicate in a professional capacity with administrators and others from Stanford and Berkeley down to WKU, and be treated like I am a valuable source of knowledge and know-how– not to mention be well-compensated for my efforts. I’ve felt quite the opposite from some at Williams after extending my hand several times, with no thought of compensation. In turn and in response, I’ve been told by several well-placed professors that “you can’t change the tiger’s stripes.” As a result, I spend my efforts elsewhere, where they seem to have an effect.
My late-night perspective.