OnCampus Senior Profiles
Jo Procter in Public Affairs reports that the Senior Profiles from the excellent OnCampus magazine (distributed at Commencement and Reunion) are available on-line. Great stuff. My favorite is on WSO impressario Evan Miller.
Evan took on ever-larger projects for the site, including a list of campus student organizations. He also rewrote the campus facebook. His senior year he founded Willipedia, the Williams answer to the Web’s Wikipedia, a free-content encyclopedia written collaboratively by contributors around the world.
“Initially I started because I found this cool piece of software out there that happened to power the Wikipedia,” he said. “So this year I got that organized and started writing some articles. I thought other people could contribute to it, too — mainly things like students guides to hiking or climbing trees.”
With others he organized a governing board for Willipedia, in case there were conflicts over submitted entries. “You need some sort of moral authority to step in there and decide the way it’s going to be,” he said. “Fortunately there haven’t been too many incidents where they’ve been necessary, although there have been a couple important ones.”
That’s me! There was a sometimes heated discussion at Willipedia about what belongs in the Campus Controversy section. Evan and I have different views on this topic.
It is not clear if the stated policy is actually enforced.
If you think that someone involved in the topic you’re writing about would prefer to go unnamed, grant them that courtesy. Mindfulness of others’ identities is necessary for Willipedia to have a strong base of contributors, and we must respect this both in how we write and in what we choose to write about.
The great majority of Willipedia topics are innocuous, and writers may cover these to the fullest extent of their knowledge. Other topics, that concern individuals of the Williams community who are likely not to want to be named in them (eg. some Pranks and Campus Controversies), must either be written without naming the names or left to media other than Willipedia.
If you, with permission, include another person’s name in a way that other editors may find questionable, note that you had the person’s permission in your edit summary or on the talk page.
Perhaps I am naive, but I am pretty sure that Professor Aida Laleian would prefer that this page did not exist.
In any event, Willipedia is great stuff. Kudos to Evan for everything he has done over the last 4 years to make Williams a better place. He will be missed.
Vote Prescott ‘92
Laura Lim Prescott ‘92 needs your vote.
How can you resist? Vote Eph!
Too Much To Count
My two Williams interns — or “summer associates”, as we officially describe them so that their resumes will look even better when they apply to Goldman Sachs — have finished up, leaving enough time to while away the rest of August with their girlfriends. Smart fellows, both. Special thanks to Evan Miller ‘06 and Diana Davis ‘07 for their help in publicizing the position.
One intern, after a visit to Williams, recounted an amusing story about how popular I am on campus. When he told a senior Williams administrator — someone that I have both criticized and praised on EphBlog — that he was working for me this summer, the administrator said:
I hope you make him so much money that he spends all his time counting it and stops blogging about Williams.
Alas, the interns were good, but not that good. Maybe next summer!
A Traditional Greeting
If First Days start today, then it must be raining in Williamstown.
Same as it ever was.
Progress
Having doubts about the progress of mankind? Consider how much better your medical care is than that received by your fellow Eph, President James Garfield ‘56.
Three vertebrae, removed from the body of President James A. Garfield, sit on a stretch of blue satin. A red plastic probe running through them marks the path of his assassins bullet, fired on July 2, 1881.
The vertebrae form the centerpiece of a new exhibit, commemorating the 125th anniversary of Garfields assassination. The exhibit also features photographs and other images that tell the story of the shooting and its aftermath, in which Garfield lingered on his deathbed for 80 days. Located at the National Museum of Health and Medicine, on the campus of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the exhibit opened on July 2 and will close, 80 days later, on Sept. 19.
Garfield was waiting at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, about to leave for New England, when he was shot twice by the assassin, Charles J. Guiteau.
As all good Ephs know, Garfield was on the way to his 25th Williams Reunion. But it wasn’t the bullet that killed him.
At the autopsy, it became evident that the bullet had pierced Garfields vertebra but missed his spinal cord. The bullet had not struck any major organs, arteries or veins, and had come to rest in adipose tissue on the left side of the presidents back, just below the pancreas.
Dr. Ira Rutkow, a professor of surgery at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and a medical historian, said: Garfield had such a nonlethal wound. In todays world, he would have gone home in a matter or two or three days.
In addition to causing sepsis by probing the wound with unsterile hands and instruments, Garfields doctors did him a disservice by strictly limiting his solid food intake, believing that the bullet might have pierced his intestines, said Dr. Rutkow, the author of James A. Garfield, a book in the American Presidents Series.
In mid-August, the doctors insisted that Garfield be fed rectally, and he received beef bouillon, egg yolks, milk, whiskey and drops of opium in this manner.
They basically starved him to death, said Dr. Rutkow, noting that the president lost over 100 pounds from July to September.
Rough. The poorest person in America today receives free medical care which is orders of magnitude better than Garfield’s was. If that isn’t progress than the term has no meaning.
The assassins lawyers tried to argue that their client was not guilty by reason of insanity. The defense was unsuccessful, and he was hanged on June 30, 1882.
Guiteau himself repeatedly criticized Garfields doctors, suggesting that they were the ones who had killed the president.
I just shot him, Guiteau said.
A clever defense.
Mission in Life
Wouldn’t it be great if David Battey’s ‘85 senior thesis were on-line?
David Battey almost wrote an undergraduate thesis on agricultural policy.
The world is probably a better place because he didn’t.
Despite some dubious professors, Battey and four fellow political economy majors at Williams College in Massachusetts delved into the subject of youth service during the spring of 1985.
The thesis inspired Battey to create the Youth Volunteer Corps of Greater Kansas City and, later, of America.
The Kansas City chapter is completing its 20th summer. Battey’s Youth Volunteer Corps can also be found in 22 states and three Canadian cities. About 15,000 youth spent 216,000 hours volunteering with the program last year.
The Corps, a nonprofit organization based in Roeland Park, Kan., has become more than a career for Battey.
“I always look upon my job as really more of a mission in life,” said the Mission Hills native who now lives in Fairway.
Interesting stuff. Who were those “dubious professors?”
Battey and his classmates’ thesis concluded that the government should do more to promote voluntarism in youth. They said a “bottoms-up” approach, or supporting grassroots programs, was better than a bureaucracy. Their project earned an A-minus.
Battey earned Williams College’s bicentennial medal in 2000 for putting into practice what he envisioned years ago.
During the Corps’ fledgling stages, he said he encountered many people who were skeptical that young people would shoulder time-consuming jobs for no pay. Then, even school-organized community service was unusual.
“The landscape of service has changed a lot — a lot,” Battey said. “It’s been great to see it.”
And what will students in POLI-EC be writing about this year?
Edit War
Someone who doesn’t like EphBlog has been removing our link at the Williams College entry in Wikipedia. This has happened before. I did not use to care so much, but I am getting more and more into Wikipedia as time goes by. You can see our discussion here, and my request for clarification on the general policy here. Wikipedia implies fairly strongly that I, as someone closely associated with EphBlog should back off and let the rest of the Wikipedia community decide this. But the deletions do not come from registered users so they strike me as more anti-EphBlog inspired than anything else.
Comments welcome.
The Mountains, yo
Ephblog gets brilliant results from Seth Brown ‘01:
“Mountains Rap”
Yo, kings of the mountain lands, represent
Stand tall in the sky, so the whole world sees.
The place where we dwell ain’t made of cement,
But there’s grass and water and mother-fuckin’ treesAnd mountains! The mountains! We greet them with a song,
The echo comes back and the world sings along
From the wind and the river to the valley and the hill,
If you ain’t sung praise to the mountains yet, you will.
Efficiency
Dan Drezner ‘90 explains the efficiency of the academy.
Occasionally the marginal idea escapes the academy and has an impact, but by and large students just want to graduate, academics just want to be insulated from the real world, and the real world wants to be isolated from loonies who go on about how great Che Guevara was. In this light, the Academy is a very efficient mechanism, creating surplus for all.
Indeed. And then EphBlog’s role would be . . .
The Mountains
For those who care about such things, the Guide to First Days is available. Always fun stuff. The first class meeting is Wednesday, August 30th and “will conclude with the singing of “The Mountains,” the College song.”
As usual, I have reached out to the JA Co-Presidents to recommend that they not just sing “The Mountains” but that they and the JAs and the first years learn “The Mountains.” Last year’s plea is here. To repeat:
Until a class of JAs decide, as a group, to learn the words by heart themselves during their training and then to teach it to all the First Years before the first evening’s events, “The Mountains” will remain a relic of a Williams that time has passed by.
Yet that is up to you. Note that once a tradition like this is started, it will in all likelihood go on forever. And you will be responsible for that. A hundred years from now the campus will look as different from today as today looks from 1906, but, if you seize this opportunity, Williams students and alumni will still be singing “The Mountains.”
My crazy plan is going to work one of these days. JA training starts about now. Perhaps this is the year . . .
Missing Cat
Marc Lynch has lost his cat.
This is a call for help to local, Williamstown-area readers only… last night, we had to bring our cat to stay with someone who lives close by the Williams Inn. He promptly knocked out a screen window and escaped. We’ve spent many hours since then walking the woods and streets around there looking for him, with no luck. If you happen to see a very scared looking, but beautiful, long-haired orange cat walking around Williamstown today, please drop me a line right away – thanks.
Perhaps one of our Williamstown readers will be able to help.
Pluto’s Not a Planet
EphBlog’s #1 fan, Jacob Eisler ‘04, notes this Eph reference.
Pluto was looking more and more like a goner yesterday as astronomers meeting in Prague continued to debate the definition of a planet.
“I think that today can go down as the ‘day we lost Pluto,’ ” said Jay Pasachoff of Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., in an e-mail message from Prague.
Under fire from other astronomers and the public, a committee appointed by the International Astronomical Union revised and then revised again a definition proposed last week that would have expanded the number of official planets to 12, locking in Pluto as well as the newly discovered Xena in the outer solar system, as well as the asteroid Ceres and Pluto’s moon Charon.
…
With two more days before the scheduled vote, there was no guarantee that Pluto would not make a comeback and that the definition of planethood might be rewritten again.
“Some people think that the astronomers will look stupid if we can’t agree on a definition or if we don’t even know what a planet is,” said Dr. Pasachoff of Williams College. “But someone pointed out that this definition will hold for all time and that it is more important to get it right.”
Well, “all time” is a long time. Pasachoff is too good an astronomer to think that all the scientific conventions of today will hold for 100 years, much less forever. Once knowledge of other solar systems increases, there will be no avoiding further changes in nomenclature.
Ephs of a certain age and comic sensibility can not help thinking of Sports Night whenever the conversation turns to Pluto’s status . . .
Piece By Piece
How is all the amazing information on Wikipedia built? Piece by piece. Sean Denniston ‘87 discovers that Charles Goodell ‘48 was a New York Congressman. He mentions it to me and I pass it on to you. That information is added to Wikipedia by someone who (I think) read it on EphBlog.
How long before Wikipedia provides a listing of every graduate of Williams, not just the famous ones, along with their current occupation and location? Not as long as you think.
Bill Couch ‘79 Deployed
Bill Couch’79, a Captain in the Naval Reserves, has been called up and is deployed, starting today, to Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. While we are very grateful Bill is not being sent to downtown Baghdad, he’ll be “just around the naval corner” and getting combat pay. So . . .
The Williams College Adopt-An-Alum Program is now reactivated. If you would like to send Bill an APOLITICAL message of support you can snail mail him at:
Capt Bill Couch
CJ-1
CJTF-HOA
APO AE 09363
Or you can e-mail him at:
Bill.Couch@omfn.com
As a reminder to my fellow Ephs who, like myself, did not get an 800 on the Verbal SAT, here’s the definition of APOLITICAL.
If you think the war is the right thing to do, GREAT. Write George Bush all about it. Don’t write it to the troops. If you think the war is the wrong thing to do, GREAT. Write George Bush all about it. Don’t write it to the troops. If you heard some fantastic dirt about a classmate that is too scandalous for even the National Enquirer to print, please e-mail this information IMMEDIATELY to me and, oh yeah, to the troops!
Youthful
Dan Daly ‘76 is a sports columnist at the Washington Times. Here he writes on his classmate Mayo Shattuck ‘76.
It would have been fun to tell people, “I graduated from college with the future commissioner of the NFL. We took the same Poli Sci class one semester, if memory serves. He was a pretty good tennis and squash player.”
Alas, Mayo Shattuck, Williams College ‘76 (and currently CEO of Baltimore’s Constellation Energy), didn’t get the job. Roger Goodell, Washington and Jefferson ‘81, did. Maybe the NFL wasn’t ready for Mayo, a fellow whose youthful wife, Molly, is a cheerleader for the Ravens.
Indeed. I like the choice of “youthful” as an adjective. Wonder what others Daly considered and rejected? By the way, assume for a second that the College is considering awarding a Bicentennial Medal to a member of the class of 1976. Assume that the choice is down to Shattuck and Daly, both successful in their fields. Odds are, the College would choose Shattuck because he has been incredibly successful, making fortunes in two different industries: banking at Alex Brown and energy at Constellation. The fact that he is ludicrously rich wouldn’t hurt his chances.
But Daly, unlike Shattuck, is still married to the woman he met at Williams. He has not traded her in for a younger, less educated model. Should that count for anything when the College decides who to honor and who not to? Just asking!
Where are my feminist friends when I need them?
Acceptable Links on EphBlog
It’s August, so what better way to spend the time than a lengthy navel-study of linking policy (what is acceptable to link to and what is not) on EphBlog. Read more if you care.
Welcome to Spencer Cluster
Spencer house has a welcome letter for the members of Spencer House. Since it’s an image, I can’t paste any text into a convenient blockquote and I’m too lazy to type anything out myself, but you can go and read it — a nice welcome letter, with energy and thought.
Considering the directory, the Spencer officers have been doing some work. I don’t see anything similar for Wood, Dodd, or Currier, but perhaps their web sites are in the works.
New CIO
Williams has a new Chief Investment Officer.
Williams College has put the final piece of the upper level management in place, hiring Boston-based investment executive Collette Chilton as its first chief investment officer to oversee its roughly $1.5 billion endowment.
Chilton is president and chief investment officer of Lucent Asset Management Corp., which manages the pension and 401(k) funds of the telecom corporation Lucent Technologies Inc.
Hmmm. I have been somewhat suspicious of the move to hire a CIO. Why mess with a system that is working well? Moreover, as Trustee Laurie Thomsen pointed out at the Boston Alumni meeting in April, the real secret behind the success of the endowment has been the committee of Ephs who have run it. They have ensured that Williams gets into all the best deals. Presumably, this will continue, but I worry.
Chilton certainly has the sort of resume that one would look for. (She was probably due to be forced out of Lucent as Alcatel takes over in the next year.) And, even better, her non-trivial salary will make other administrators seem cheap by comparison. She talks sense in this interview.
CPEE: What impresses you in a job candidate?
Chilton: People in an interview situation need to have a clue about what they are talking about! You would be surprised at how many people just haven’t done the research and don’t even understand the job they for which they are interviewing. People come in and don’t really know the role investment managers play within a company, or what assets we oversee–really basic stuff.
One thing not to do is to come in and say, “I’ll take this entry-level job for now, but in two years I should have your job!” Job candidates have to have a clear, realistic sense of what they want to do, both short-term and long-term.
Very true. The Eagle goes on with:
The post was created by the reorganization of the school’s upper-level management, which has been ongoing for a year.
Chilton said that having an investment office is important when you have enough assets to oversee.
“Having someone whose responsibility day in and day out is to oversee and invest it and all the myriad details that go with that is more than a full-time job,” she said.
Then why was the endowment’s performance over the last 10 years so outstanding?
“They clearly did an outstanding job (resulting in double-digit annual growth), but the volume and complexity of overseeing an increasingly large portfolio rendered that model unsustainable,” President Morton O. Schapiro wrote in a letter making the announcement. “With a chief investment officer, Williams will for the first time have an experienced professional overseeing on a day-to-day basis an operation of great importance to all that we do at the College and all that we’ll be able to do in the future.”
Perhaps. As long as the focus continues to be on getting access, via plugged in Ephs on the Finance Committee, to the best deals, I am satisfied. Indeed, Chilton might play a useful role as score-keeper, reporting on which deals have paid off the best for the College. Rich Ephs can be quite competitive in their desire to do well for Williams.
At about $1.5 billion, the college’s endowment is one of the largest in the nation for a small liberal arts school.
There are some limits to how the money can be invested. In June, the trustees chose not to invest in 28 multinational corporations that do business in Sudan, as part of an effort to stop the government-sponsored genocide in that country’s Darfur region.
Gibberish! The Eagle reporter, Chris Marcisz, is smarter than this. The trustees chose not to invest directly in these companies. The College has so few direct stock holdings that this doesn’t matter. The College did not promise to stop investing in hedge funds and other pooled vehicles which themselves invest in companies which do business in Sudan. For all anyone knows, those hedge funds have millions of dollars invested with those companies.
The entire Sudan Divestment schtick is moral preening, devoid of investment substance.
Best part is that Alcatel — the company that is in the process of buying Lucent and, I think, indirectly leading to Chilton’s departure — is on the Sudan list! Maybe Chilton quit for moral reasons! She couldn’t stand the thought of working for a company which does business with the government of Sudan.
She’ll be based in Boston and will have an office at Williams.
I am jealous.
Eph on the Corner
Williams Bennett ‘65 is blogging at The Corner.
It was said of Churchill that his greatness laid in seeing things how they really were, seeing things in their misery and seeing things in their greatness. The task is the same for us, or should be.
Indeed. Read more for Bennett’s take on the Israel/Lebanon conflict. It is, shall we say, different from Professor Marc Lynch’s. Since we’re all about ideological diversity at EphBlog, we highly recommend both.
My classmate, Rodney Cunningham ‘88, noted that EphBlog never discussed Bennett’s controversial comments on abortion, race and crime. True! Of course, whenever anyone points out something that EphBlog has failed to cover, I invite them to join EphBlog and cover it themselves. But Rodney was too smart to fall for that one.
Since bloggers ranging across the political spectrum (from Brad Delong to Ed Morrissey) defended Bennett, there isn’t much for me to add.
Vacation
There was talk a few months ago of what a great idea it would be to give me a vacation, to have someone else (or some group of someones) take over the daily posting chore. That would make EphBlog more Eph and less Kane. Great idea! Alas, although some fine thoughts were expressed, nothing came of the effort. Perhaps in the fall? Perhaps next summer?
In any event. I am taking some time away. Apologies if responses and comments are not as quick and voluminous as usual. I have pre-posted material for the next two weeks so that, even if I can’t login, you’ll have a daily dose of Ephery to get you through the summer. Enjoy! Breaking news will probably bring me back, but not too quickly, I hope.
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College News- Center for Development Economics Brings Rich Diversity to Williamstown
- Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art, Class of 2009 (Corrected 6/25/09)
- J.R.R. Tolkien & C.S. Lewis Illustrator's Work Comes to Williams College Library
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- Anne O'Leary named NGCA All-American Scholar for 3rd straight year
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- Dan Greenberg '08 named head coach of men's tennis
- CRCA names Justin Moore National Coach of the Year
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