Two comments:

a) Williams has an admissions problem. Normal, bright, motivated college students do not urinate on the floor of common rooms and spread feces.

b) Unless Sheehey has compromising pictures of Morty, the College doesn’t seem to care. The thug who beat the kid to near-death the other night had already been suspended for a year and allowed to return to the football team. Lives in Gladden, which has apparently been an ongoing source of mayhem.

hwc: Sounds as if you are finding the football team guilty by association.

The college should make clear that willful destruction of property is an offense against the Honor Code. If you go out and break stuff, and then make your housemates, classmates, and perfect strangers pay for the damage, that’s a violation of the Honor Code.

I do not believe that reporting people for destructive behavior is “snitching” any more than reporting someone who cheats on a final exam or plagiarizes a paper is “snitching.” The college treats students as honorable adults; those students who will not behave as honorable adults need to be removed. Give them a full and fair hearing, and then get them the hell out of town.

Is failure to snitch when one knows something about which to snitch a breach of the Honor Code? If a clandestine destruction occurs and if then no snitching identifies the perpetrator, are a certain number of randomly selected students penalized? Are penalties carried out at a public gathering at which attendance is compulsory? Are snitchers awarded Iron Crosses? Do penalties against breakers of the Honor Code also involve actions against the first born offspring of the breakers? Just curious on behalf of the maquis.

Again, what I am proposing is purely voluntary. No student would be required to submit a picture or report an incident. Instead, this is a mechanism by which students who want to try to change the culture of Williams might have a chance of doing so.

HWC,

Coaches can be a part of the solution, and the college can help coaches become part of the solution.

We all know that coaches are responsible for at least 66 students securing a place in each entering class. It seems logical that since the coaches are responsible for these students’ access to a Williams education, they should also be responsible for the actions of the students whose entrance they facilitate.

There are several ways to do this.

1) Coaches salaries are tied directly to the number of disciplinary actions received by their athletes. Each coach would receive a base salary, and a 5% bonus if the number of infractions committed by their students was below X, a 2% bonus if the number of disciplinary actions/infractions was between X and Y, and no bonus if their athletes’ number of disciplinary actions was above Y. The coaches’ jobs are not limited to ensuring that their teams win; they also need to take an active role in shaping responsible citizens. My salary is tied to my performance, why should that of the coaches be any different??

Such a policy would have two major ramifications.
First, coaches would pressure their athletes to behave themselves. Second, and more importantly, coaches would be more likely to ADMIT students who were GOOD ATHLETES and GOOD PEOPLE.

2) The 66 tips are distributed in a manner such that if a particular sports team receives an unacceptably high number of disciplinary actions, the team is punished by having a certain number of tips/protects diverted from their team to another more well-behaved team for the next entering class.

I agree with HWC that this IS an admissions problem, but I think we need to proactively think about ways in which the problem can be solved, rather than simply whining and pointing fingers.

Can the Ephblog readers think of any more ways in which the college can work with the coaches/adcoms to improve the athletes’ behavior??

David, can you please start a separate thread for this topic. I think it’s an important one, and I hope the folks in Hopkins, Bascom and Lasell are reading…

Dang it.. I wrote this super long posted that never got posted.

The problem can be solved by the President of the College sitting down with the Athletic Director and telling him that he either cleans it up or he’s gone.

Sheehey seems to have the run of the place as if he were Bear Bryant. Two years ago, Williams had a high-school recruit on an overnight visit hospitalized for days, near death, from alcohol poisoning. The rest of the school implemented changes to overnight policy to prevent a recurrence. Sheehey said he would “think about it” for athletic visits, but did NOTHING. This year, another high-schooler on an athletic overnight visit ended up in North Adams Hospital. Why is Sheehey able to set his own policy independent of the College?

Why isn’t Morty coming down on Sheehey like a ton of bricks? Is the Sears Cup really that important? Or does Sheehey have compromising photographs?

How hard is it for the administration to pinpoint where the problems are coming from? Don’t they know who lives in Bryant House? Or Perry House?

I’ll stand up to myself. Refusing to be publically shamed is not thuggish. Destroying property is. When you start publically humiliating people, you become the thug you are railing against, David. Anyway, take it easy.

It seems to me that the people urinating in public places aren’t really going to care if a picture of their intoxicated self appears on a website somewhere. (At least, that’s what would be suggested by the fact that they’re acting that way in the first place…)

Adam claims that “Refusing to be publicly shamed is not thuggish.” Perhaps. But threatening to “beat the absolute hell” out of someone who, say, took your picture while you were trashing the picnic tables in the freshman quad or pissing in the corner at some party is definitely thuggish. But I am happy to assume that Adam made that comment in jest.

There is an interesting discussion to be had about rights and responsibilities in this context. But, at least by the laws of Massachusetts and regulations at Williams, there is no problem with the plan. Adam can “refuse” to be shamed as much as he likes, but he can not prevent fellow Ephs from taking pictures. He can not prevent them from posting those pictures on WSO. He can not prevent other students/faculty/alumni from viewing those pictures or commenting on them.

In this context, it is the shamers and not the shamees who have the power.

Mary Beth is perfectly right to worry that this plan would have no effect. Perhaps. But it is an empirical question. The reason that students do bad things is because, right now, there are few meaningful consequences for acting badly. I think that the small percentage of disrespectful and destructive students would be deterred by the threat of public posting.

You can be certain that every coach at Williams would want to ensure that his players did not appear in such a wall of shame. You can be certain that many employers would be hesitant to hire someone who demonstrated a serious lack of concern for the community norms of Williams.

Would it work? I don’t know. Yet nothing else suggested has a chance to.

To me the biggest concern of all is teams drinking with recruits. High school kids certainly shouldn’t be drinking to begin with, and it’s particularly dangerous (as we’ve seen) for these kids to drink with more experienced college kids, as they are likely to really hurt themselves trying to keep up / impress their future teammates / just because they don’t know their own limits yet. It also sets an awful expectation that team sport participation is affliated with alcohol right from the get-go. Just like the hockey team was collectively punished due to team-instigated hazing a number of years ago, drinking with prospectives on visits should be flat out 100 percent prohibited, and teams that violated that policy should have to forfeit games or face other collective sanctions. You can be damn sure that if that happened once, the practice would stop due to pressure from team captains, etc. If that turns off prospectives who have a wild time getting drunk at other NESCAC visits, all the better.

Frank, I know you get mad at everyone with the whole guilt-by-association thing, and it is a shame that the good eggs on certain teams that come under scrutiny are thus associated. But the fact is, that year after year after year, it is folks affiliated with a small handful of varsity and club sports who are responsible for a huge (and enormously disproportionate) percentage of campus damage, violence and other major campus issues. I am sure this is not unique to Williams — in fact I would bet the same group of teams create the same issues at basically every NESCAC school. I know for a fact that they stand out from the norm at Amherst, from folks I have known who went there. And no, they are not girls’ teams — I have rarely, if ever, heard of any major problems affiliated with any women’s team. Perhaps it is because to succeed in those sports you in some ways need to be able to channel violent aggression, but I don’t think that explains the extent of the problem. I think in some ways the NESCAC as a whole needs to address the issues. Since everyone knows which sports are the biggest trouble makers, either change admissions standards, league-wide (note Tom Parker’s statements about “being able to field a team” in two sports — well, if everyone in the conference faced the same constraints, they would still be just as competitive with one another and still able to “field a team”), for the programs, or create league-wide policies that force coaches to take more drastic actions (like one severe strike and you’re off the team) to curtail misbehavior from team members.

Does anyone else see that not only will this plan never work (I personally don’t carry cameras around with me at 3am on Saturday morning in the hope of catching destruction taking place, and even if I did see a 350 pound football player destroying a couch, I certainly wouldn’t take a picture of him and risk his intoxicated retribution) but that it will also quickly turn into a center of rumor mongering? Perhaps David has been out of college a bit long, but I can assure him that it is significantly more likely that pictures of embarrassing hookups will end up on this site to the chagrin of all involved than any pictures of the serious acts of vandalism taking place.

This plan would not have worked 20 years ago because cameras were rarely carried. Some/many students now regularly carry cell phones with cameras as well as digital cameras. The number doing so (and the quality of the cameras) increases each year. Cell phone video cameras will soon be quite common. I think that the plan would work, but who knows?

The problem of hook-up (and other inappropriate) pictures is easily solved by having a committee in charge of the site. The committee would ensure that only appropriate examples of damaging and disrespectful behavior were posted and that the resulting discussion was civil. We somehow manage to do this (for the most part!) on EphBlog, despite allowing anonymous comments.

Again, if you want to lesson the amount of picnic table destruction of living room urination, you (the students) need to do something, you need to take control of your own community. You need to police yourselves. The College is not going to do it for you (at least in anyway that you would find acceptable).

“It seems to me that the people urinating in public places aren’t really going to care if a picture of their intoxicated self appears on a website somewhere.”

Put it prominently on their transcripts (which is where it belongs.)

I honestly don’t know how we can draw any conclusion except that the College really doesn’t care enough to do anything. They accepted a football recruit early decision this year who had been suspended from his high school in the 10th grade for a drinking incident. Do we really think this kid is not going to come to Williams hell-bent on binge drinking?

Of the 6,000 applicants, the admissions office couldn’t manage to fill 538 slots with students who had not been suspended for drinking? I suspect the admissions office could indeed do that if the power that be told them to do so.

Going back to our housing history, what the administration wished, in ‘68 or so, was an Honor Code which compelled students to report (”rat out”) other violations of the Honor Code. They’ve never really deviated from that vision of how Housing should work.

Why this never worked seems to me, obviously, that students were never going to hand other students to the Deans’ Office for judgement. Period.

Deep Springs, on the other hand, is run by a direct student democracy. Do students bring the poor behavior of other students to call? You bet– and the students then judge their peers.

(Instead of pointing out potential for excesses in this system, I’ll leave it to Frank to mock it).

Whatever any of us may think of fraternity life– in general, historically, it did a better job of regulating such behaviors that the current system.

Could Williams students live under direct democracy? I doubt it, even if it were a desired goal. But perhaps we could tip the scales a bit until they were judged by their peers, and “parentalism” was largely erased from the picture.

Oh, and as for:

I would beat the absolute hell out of anyone who tried to “publically shame” me…

Jest or no, that’s the kind of statement that plays all-so-beautifully in front of a grand jury.

too lazy to html it so here’s the quote from Ken:

“Whatever any of us may think of fraternity life– in general, historically, it did a better job of regulating such behaviors that the current system.”

Unfair characterization across time. Too many changes have taken place(drinking age, legal rights of student and college, media coverage of such events, etc.) since Williams had frats for this to be a valid point of comparison. Rather, let’s compare to similar schools with frats and see if there’s a difference. I don’t know if there is, but I don’t like comparisons to a long long ago Williams for the sake of making a point about how much it fails now.

“Could Williams students live under direct democracy? I doubt it, even if it were a desired goal. But perhaps we could tip the scales a bit until they were judged by their peers, and “parentalism” was largely erased from the picture.”

People are judged by their peers, just not officially. The peer groups at Williams find the nuisances of public urination and minor vandalism to be inconsequential in comparison to the desire to not intervene in other people’s business. Now, when that equation also allows for a culture when someone can get his/her head bashed in or major damage to buildings without any action, that’s a problem.

But that’s where parentalism is needed, I’d argue. There are two clear role models who define what the Williams experience and culture is/should be: older students and the faculty/administration. Both need to change the culture for any cultural change to function. The admin needs to be serious with its penalties to indicate a strict policy. It needs to speak with one mouth about it too. Older students need to be the ones telling students that acts of violence are not acceptable.

Take any group…to get away from the anti-athlete bias that could be thrown at this logic, let’s use a dance group. If they’re having a party and an idiot frosh gets too drunk and does something dumb, here’s what happens in david’s model and in mine:

david: picture is (anonymously?) posted on a website. Student gets mixture of jeers and cheers (dude, you made the site! Sweet man!). Most continue on with their lives like nothing happened. Student claims moment was a one time mistake. If this is repeated action, people know this about said student, then s/he only gets to drink with buddies who enable this style of living and s/he continues to be pictured and posted about. Creates a campus of people who get drunk and do stupid stuff vs. their photographers. sounds like a fun place.

mine: student does stupid thing. Older students in dance group at next party tell him/her not to drink cuz they aren’t going to tolerate bullshit like that ever again at one of their things. Next time, student gets some drinks, but not to excess. Now, student has choice: drunkeness and loss of cool older friends, or more moderate drinking without disruptive behavior and friends.

As I learned in moving from friend group to friend group before finding a niche at Williams, peers can be replaced. quite easily, in fact (as long as you don’t do something unbelievably abhorrent). role models within interest groups and adminstrations cannot be so easily replaced.

now, how to get older students to be strong role models is a much more difficult question.

rory: If the Williams student body in general is reasonable in its outlook as should be expected and if reasonable student peer pressure and leadership exists as should be expected, then no Honor Code is needed. If not, then we are lost, and no Honor Code will be effective. If students don’t know enough to refrain from peeing on the floor, intentionally breaking furniture and the like, they ought to be “schooled” appropriately by mature student leadership (of which Williams should have an abundance) without the foolishness of an Honor Code (e.g. certain junior or senior football players might be very good at “schooling”) or alternatively in obvious cases weeded out in advance by the Admissions Office. Do these morons pee on the floor and break furniture when they are at home? They don’t need an Honor Code, detailed, simplified or otherwise, to know that these actions are absolutely unacceptable, and, if engaged in, it ought to be clear without the benefit of a Code that the perpetrators will be brought to a reasonable accounting by student leadership in the ordinary course.

Employers and graduate schools want to see what you did during the past four years, and that’s what transcripts are for. Just as they might want to know your grade in first-year rocks and stars, they might equally want to know, and justly, whether you urinated into refrigerators, crapped out third-story windows, broke the President’s house window with a concrete brick, started bonfires and burned your neighbor’s belongings, sent racist or homophobic e-mails, or attempted to murder a friend of a former friend who once dated your girlfriend.

You don’t get “three strikes” in rocks’n’stars. Or the chance to explain it away. It just is, and you have to deal with it.

rory:

You raise a fundamental point about the importance of informal role modeling and standards of behavior in a college community.

I think this highlights the major weakness of the freshman apartheid housing model. By segregating freshmen from upperclass students, they spend the first critical months of their college experience (when they are at least sub-consciously trying to figure out the college “thing”) with essentially no role modeling beyond that provided by one or two JAs.

So what happens is that the role modeling during those early months comes almost exclusively from other “newbies”, rather than from students who have navigated the waters between high school and college and who can show how to balance the various demands and freedoms of responsible near-adult college life. Depending on the luck of the draw in freshmen entry assignments, it could well be that the only “role-modeling” new students receive is of the kids-gone-wild variety. They miss the experience of living in a room next to, for example, the sophmore, juniors, and seniors who have figured out how to have fun on a Saturday night without urinating in the common room or without interfering with the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be deeply engaged in a challenging academic environment.

I know that the freshman entry is a sacred cow at Williams. But, the apartheid nature of the first-year housing plays a significant role in shaping the college culture.

Bring back old fashioned fraternities - their racism (for the vast majority of them), anti-semitism (for many), sexism (for all), anti-intellectualism (for some) and snobbery (for a few) would be a small price to pay for the benefits of their order, as-it-unforeseeably-and-parodoxically-has-developed relative alcohol control, freedom from drugs, vibrant social life and convenience of kitchens!

Your premises are not entirely true. For instance, I would call Security on the guys in my house in an instant, I’m not hesitant to “rat out” these particular peers. The reason I haven’t called Security (yet!) is simply because I haven’t observed any damaging behavior (yet!). When I go through that part of the house, those guys are always watching TV or playing beirut or something else that may involve good quantities of beer, but they aren’t running around the house tearing the walls down. About three fire doors separate my suite from the rest of the house, so I don’t know when they hit that point. I can’t very well call Security at ten on Saturday and say, “hi, I don’t have any complaint now because nothing bad is happening at the moment; however, I know that sometime between now and three AM these guys are going to break a chair.”

Your idea is one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard, frankly. First, it can only become a vehicle for blackmail; second, the dividing line between a postworthy picture and not is far too fuzzy (I can already visualize: “REWARD - Wanted for not cleaning up after himself. Contact Sheriff’s office”); and your proposal is not likely to deter anyone at all. As a friend of mine said–”we already have that, it’s called thefacebook.com!”