Thu 16 Mar 2006
Ballots for this year’s elections for Alumni Trustee and Tyng Administrator are due in a few weeks. Now that the on-line balloting is over, I can’t find the election statements on the web. I have reproduced them below. (If the candidates object, please let me know and I will remove them.) Current office holders are listed here.
A brief reading of the descriptions and the personal statements demonstrates that the election is somewhat of a farce. It is impossible for any alumni to make an informed choice because we are told virtually nothing about the policies that the candidates actually favor. It is little more than a popularity contest, and a strange one at that since only a few hundred of the tens of thousands of alumni voters personally know the candidates.
Note that this is not the fault of the candidates. The College tells them explicitly not to “campaign” and urges them to write the most banal sort of personal statements. But, to cast an informed vote, we need to know their actual opinions.
Since EphBlog is here to solve problems (at least on some days), I am trying to improve the quality of the election by getting each candidate to answer the following question:
For Alumni Trustee candidates:
What decisions made by the trustees in the last decade have, in your view, added the most to the quality of Williams? Which policies do you think, going forward, are most in need of a new direction?
For Tyng Administrator candidates:
What aspects of the Tyng program have, in your view, been most successful in the last decade? How would you want to shape the program going forward?
My purpose here is, obviously, not to ask awkward questions. I do not want to put candidates on the spot. I applaud their willingness to serve. I just need more information. I want to know how Williams would be different if, say, David Bowen is elected in place of Wendy Coakley or Suzanne Biemiller. I want to cast my vote on some basis more substantial then their pictures and biographies, as impressive as those are.
I will ask each candidate to either submit a comment to this thread or to e-mail me a response which I might share with the hundreds of alumni readers of EphBlog. One of the reasons that alumni participation in these elections is so low (15% or so) is that alumni see little reason to cast an uninformed vote. More information would help.
Candidate Statements
Alumni Trustee
David C. Bowen ‘83
David is co-founder of Ascend Venture Group, a private investment management firm specializing in applied technology and education companies. He started Ascend in 2000 after an investment banking career at Goldman Sachs and Salomon Smith Barney. He holds an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, where he was chair of a trustee committee overseeing part of their endowment. David attended Regis High School in Manhattan where he was a trustee and chaired the investment committee for their endowment. He also served on the Williams Club Board of Governors, the Williams Black Alumni Network Steering Committee and as vice chairman for the Third Century Campaign.
“Frederick Douglas once taught that education can advance a person or a populous. The Williams education I received has been my primary advancement vehicle, and it has shaped who I am today. I learned to think critically, formed life-long relationships, and strengthened my personal notion of responsibility to others. Since then, it has been rewarding to volunteer at each of my alma maters. I have served as trustee at both my business and high schools. Having been responsible in stewarding those schools’ resources, I have a perspective on what Williams must continue to do to ensure its legacy as a place of advancement for future students. It is an honor to ask you to consider my service to Williams as an alumni trustee.”
Wendy Webster Coakley ‘85
Wendy is manager of corporate communications and public relations for Berkshire Life Insurance Company of America in Pittsfield, Mass. She executes strategic communications to key corporate stakeholders, including employees, policyholders, the sales force, media and the community. She also oversees the company’s charitable giving. Wendy joined Berkshire in 1996 as editor of its magazine and newsletter, following an 11-year public relations career in Washington, D.C., that culminated in the position of media spokeswoman for the National Restaurant Association. Wendy has a long history of volunteering for Williams, and currently serves as president of the Williams Association of the Berkshires and class secretary.
“In one capacity or another, I have volunteered for Williams since the moment I left campus 20 years ago, and it has been a source of pride and constant joy ever since. No matter where I have lived or which turns my life’s journey has taken, staying connected to Williams through service has allowed me to interact with some of the finest people I know. I have found that, while their decade of graduation may distinguish their views on individual issues, the alumni continuum from Old Guard to Generations X, Y and Z shares a desire for Williams’ continued excellence that is ageless and passionate. It would be an honor to articulate that aspiration on behalf of all generations of Ephs as your Alumni Trustee.”
Suzanne R. Biemiller ‘87
Suzanne was awarded a master’s degree in Public Policy from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and has put her degree to active use. She worked on defense conversion projects for the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp., and has been a program officer with the Pew Charitable Trusts in Philadelphia since 1998, with a two-year leave to serve as executive director of the Chestnut Hill Business Assoc. She is active in her community and has volunteered for Williams in several capacities, including the Executive Committee of the Society of Alumni, Young Alumni National Advisory Committee, and currently serves as class secretary and class agent.
“As a program officer at the Pew Charitable Trusts, I work on projects to strengthen Philadelphia’s rich historic and cultural assets and enhance its civic life. Much of this job involves partnerships with government and nonprofit organizations and requires strong project management, communication, consensus-building, and leadership skills. It helps to be both creative and analytic. I am also the mother of two young girls and have thus become particularly deft at active listening, problem-solving, and multi-tasking! In many ways, my life reflects an important principle that I learned at Williams - strong communities depend upon the active participation of their members. I am eager to apply that lesson again at Williams as a member of the Board of Trustees.”
Tyng Administrator
Jean Henderson Tibbetts ‘75
A 1979 graduate of Tufts University School of Medicine, Jean is an ophthalmologist with a private practice - Eye Center Northeast - in Bangor, Maine. She also serves as chief of the eye section at St. Joseph Hospital in Bangor, and is an active staff member at Eastern Maine Medical Center, also in Bangor. In addition to her busy practice, Jean is a clinical instructor in Ophthalmology at Tufts School of Medicine. An active researcher, Jean has participated in several long-term clinical research studies in her field of expertise.
“I was told Williams was looking for a ’seasoned’ woman in the medical field. Webster’s defines ’season’ as: to give more flavor or zest; to give a distinctive quality to; to qualify by admixture; to temper. Done! Between my youth in New York and my 20-plus years as an ophthalmologist in Maine, where I treat everything from child abuse to moose injuries, I sometimes wonder, is there anything I haven’t seen? If there is, my three teenagers seem bent on completing my education. I paid for medical school myself, but it was easier then - tuition was lower and expectations were higher. The Tyng Bequest helps ensure that talented students can pursue their goals without financial distress. That’s a vision I would like to be part of.”
Anne E. Youngling ‘78
Anne is proof that Williams prepares its students for a well-rounded life. From 1985 to 1994, Anne owned AMI Construction in Norwalk, Conn., specializing in residential carpentry and general contracting. Soon afterward, she turned to the study of medicine and graduated from the University of New England College of Osteopathic Medicine in Biddeford, Maine. Following her residency at the Middlesex Hospital in Connecticut, she is now a staff physician at ProHealth Physicians in Guilford, Conn. For 14 years, she served as Admissions Committee chairperson and as a member of the Executive Committee of the Fairfield County Chapter of the Williams Alumni Association.
“Completing an advanced degree 24 years after my Williams experience puts me in a unique position to appreciate the many challenges of obtaining a graduate education. The process encompasses more than just the challenge of pursuing a career interest, it is a life-altering experience, especially in mid-life. My Williams education helped me develop the tools to pursue my dreams in two very disparate fields. My volunteer work for Williams, especially as a local admissions representative for many years, has allowed me to come face to face with young people ready to pursue their dreams. I would be honored to serve as a Tyng Administrator to help pave the way for deserving students to have their own graduate school experience.”
Elizabeth Shorb St. Clair ‘80
Elizabeth is a marketing communications consultant based in Williamstown. Armed with a master’s degree in English from the University of Virginia, Elizabeth worked for five years in marketing support for a subsidiary of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Prior to striking out on her own, she was an instructor of English at Southern Vermont College in Bennington, Vt., for 10 years and chaired the college’s Strategic Planning Committee. She serves as alumni representative to the Williams Advisory Committee for Shareholder Responsibility and is an active volunteer in the Williamstown community.
“For many years I taught at a college just up the road from Williams but unlike Williams in almost every way. Yet despite their differences, both bring to their students an extraordinary potential to transform lives. Most of my students were the first in their family to attend college, and I saw how access to higher education changed their lives. Similar transformations happen at Williams for many students, thanks in part to the scholarships made possible by the generosity of the Tyng Bequest. Living in Williamstown has given me many opportunities to connect with Williams students on committees, as volunteers and as friends. I would be honored to serve them and the College as a Tyng Administrator.
14 Responses to “Eph Elections”
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For openers, let’s invite the candidates to offer their views on Mr. Uible’s suggestion which, again, illustrates that East High School in Cleveland was a feeder school for high IQ linemen:
“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!”
Um, I don’t second the comment about frats. let sleeping dogs lie.
David, your points are completely valid — and the mystery of why we should even participate in such a farce of an election remains. Alumni, if htey ever had any teeth outside of AFTER writing checks, certainly don’t in this process. Unless these candidates are to be seen as representative of the people who chose them as candidates (whoever that may be).
Maybe it’s actually very hard to find candidates, and this fact is something that some prefer to discreetly omit.
Another question may be whether this is at all unusual, these sort of ‘elections’: this seems like a lip-service process you’d find at other schools as well.
Asterisk to the above: I really should not complain, because I have only a vague sense of what the society of alumni does on a monthly basis and am a poor participant in group bonding effforts among alumni. However, I do read email, and I do respond to requests for things like ‘voting.’
While we as alumni are not really like stock-holders, we do have a stake in the College, albeit amorphous and ill-defined.
In normal companies, if 3% of shareholders want specific information request about company practices, the motion must come to a general vote before the rest of the shareholders. It’s not to ohard to get 3% if the idea is valid. Perhaps the society of alumni should harness the power of our the intenet age and adopt measures which would allow similar amounts of participation across the wide field of alumni the college enjoys.
(Again, I should probably go read the bylaws of the society of alumni, or the college’s alumni relations policies, but I’m too busy. Me and the rest of the alumni.)
(that was me)
Here is the e-mail that I just sent to the 6 candidates. I also cc’d Wendy Hopkins, secretary of the society of alumni.
I thought about writing to each individually (and not cc’ing Wendy) since that might have led to at least an answer or two, which would have provided incentive for more responses. By writing to them all together, I increase the likelihood that the College will tell them all (nicely) to be quiet and not respond. I hope that this doesn’t happen but predict that it will.
The College does not like to nominate people who won’t accept guidance from the Society of Alumni. But perhaps I am too pessimistic . . .
I am repeatedly amazed at how close you often come to something I would write, or would want written, but then do something to go seriously awry in my mind. Take your email above. You have two purposes I gather. First, you would actually like to get the answers you request. Second, you would like to reform the current election culture.
Your second goal would be served if you achieved the first. You should write the email asking the honest question most likely to get you the honest answer. Your To recipients are only interest in your first goal; they are in the midst of playing the election game and cannot be concerned with your second. Your cc recipient is a different story, but she is not the person you ought to be composing for.
Nevertheless, you seem to write well for your first goal until the second half of the second to last paragraph. Then you say:
Now you’ve set your question to these people in the context of a battle with the College. Furthermore, you come across as petulant, somehow spurned (IMHO). The standalone “Is that too much to ask?” is going to make any sensitive reader stop and wonder, “Wait, what the hell is really going on here?”
Stop writing. Let someone else make Wendy’s argument, or make it yourself only after you don’t get replies.
I agree with this criticism. In retrospect, I should have left out that paragraph and not cc’d Wendy. That might be considered a bit underhanded in that Wendy was nice enough to chat with me on the topic, but I agree with your judgment that such a strategy would have served the overall purpose better.
As to excuses, I have no good ones. Dealing with the College on these sorts of issues is an endless hassle because its preferred (and wise) strategy is to ignore me (and others). Alas, that makes me petulant.
But, you’re right. I should hide that petulance better.
If I had more energy, I would call the candidates up (none have bothered to respond, as predicted above) and get some sort of statement, but spring break is here and there are only so many hours in the day. Perhaps an EphBlog reader will call up the candidates? I wish that the Record would report on these elections.
Where will all these efforts go in the future? I don’t know. At some point, even I may just give up and let the College go down its traditional (and successful!) path of being run by insiders, of ignoring voices from outside the mainstream.
Then again, the Society of Alumni constitution is an interesting document. There is a meeting each year. Anyone may speak at that meeting. Anyone (with the help of a second) may bring a motion to the floor. Votes must be taken. There is much mischief that could be made. My initial idea would be to propose a change in the constitution which would allow for alums to submit petitions so that outsiders could get on the ballot without being vetted by the nominating committee.
But that is a windmill for another year.
David: Relax. Petulance can be the spice of life. It is in a large part of mine.
A more fundamental issue is that a majority of the trustees claim that the principal purpose of the Board should be fundraising, and thus state that the Board should consist primarily of fundraisers and major donors with deep pockets.
I disagree.
The domination of college boards of trustees by executives and investors causes decisions to be made and university administrators to be hired who reflect their views.
It is time to democratize higher education.
One of the things that makes Williams College special is that indeed we as alumni have a right to elect 1/3 of the trustees. It is time to start advocating that students, professors and workers at Williams College also have elected representation on the board. That does not mean we should not have fundraisers and donors too, but there is a gaping lack of diversity of views and perspectives on the board.
This idea is not that experimental: in many European countries, the entire board of each university is elected by the students, professors, and workers. Moreover, with an endowment as large as that of Williams College, honestly, do you think the most important thing for the institution is to raise even more money? I personally choose to give my money to community groups in disadvantaged areas; Williams has plenty of money in perpetuity for scholarships already.
In terms of picking between individual candidates, sometimes you can figure out certain things from candidates’ biographies, and other times you can do a web search to find out more. I remember a year or two ago there was a candidate whose bio seemed good to me, but when I did a web search it was clear that he was a Bush supporter - not someone whose views I would be likely to be in agreement.
This year, one of the three trustee candidates worked for the National Restaurant Association: if you are a living wage advocate for students and residents who work at Williams College, the organization she worked for has been a strong opponent of living wage and universal health care efforts. That doesn’t mean she is an evil person, but as a trustee that is an example of an issue that could come up where someone’s background might influence their approach and decision.
Let’s figure out a way to universally redistribute that Williams endowment!
That doesn’t mean she is an evil person. . . I agree. How dare she have the temerity to fight against policies that would likely increase unemployment and inflation!
After all, we should be like France with its wonderfully high wages, short hours, long vacations, and 15% unemployment.
Lowell,
Not in any way to agree with our anonymous poster, much less with the riots over job entitlements in France last week; however, 15% is a high quote, and rather meaningless given that the United States uses very different criteria for counting its ‘unemployed.’
Equally, this is not to begin to touch the ‘fact’ that most of the people I know in the European Ministries consider the US to have imposed economic sanctions on their countries, and such geopolitical moves to have affected unemployment rates by a point or two.
Finally, not directed to you (but to the anonymous poster), democracy– I’ll have to be pedantic and remind that the word is democratia, “the rules of the demes,” — is about process, not redistribution– although those processes which assure fair distrubution of rewards (more simply: dike, “justice,”) are indeed “fair question.”
Off topic really, but since the French situation was raised…
Perhaps someone who knows better than I can answer my question:
If there is really a lot of unemployment in France and labor laws and regulations are a significant contributing factor, then why is there not a lot of self-employment (newstands or restaurants that end up making their owner-operators a subminimum wage), or black-market employment (day laborers as with illegal immigrants in California) or both? Perhaps there is and I don’t know about it? Or perhaps there are other factors supressing these kinds of arrangements?
Alex,
Glad to see you step in here. I’m afraid I cannot give a good answer, but I will take a stab, in between my attempts to make sense of Ashkenazic and Sephardic versions of the Kaddish.
There is a thriving informal economy in France, especially in the services sector; I’ve experienced no problem finding short-term tech work, for instance. As in the US, many (restaurant, etc) jobs are not as low-paying as you might expect.
These sectors are largely closed along roughtly racial lines; I’m overgeneralizing, but I can’t imagine the kind of immigrant worker population as in California.
Construction is largely regulated and not open to “immigants”– that’s not quite the right world– and, in most of Europe, farm labor is lucrative ($20-25/hr in France) and protected from the pressures we see in the US.
Demographically, (see American Demographics circa summer 2002), Europe is rapidly aging while the US (due to immigration) is getting younger and poorer.
Notably, France’s “immigrant” population is the result of guest-worker programs from its colonies, who were needed to sustain economic growth during post-war reconstruction, but neither needed (in that way) or integrated now. This is a pattern throughout Europe, and the US to a lesser extent.
Unemployment disproportionately affects the young because of how darn near impossible it is to fire someone, and the general bureaucracy, which (throughout Europe) is utterly unbelievable from an “American” perspective.
More or less equally, access to high-level positions is highly “socially stratified,” requiring an extremely narrow path through elite institutions, very high test and other scores, and usually at this point, relative wealth or power.
Entrepreneurship, while present, seems to me remarkably narrow compared to anywhere in the states, much less the sense of a place like Silicon Valley. People simply expect state jobs, and remarkable privileges with them.
One Belgian State TV station, for instance, recently declared that beer would not be available for purchase in the cafeteria before noon, causing an uproar. This seems, to me, almost outside the “American” experience of the United States.
Well, almost. One common observation in certain circles I knew in Silicon Valley, for instance, was that Atari collapsed after it instituted a no-pot policy on the campus; from what I hear from people at Lucasfilm, they are having similar “problems” with the Presidio’s zero-tolerance policy.