Eph SecState?
Which Eph is most likely to be Secretary of State in 2009? Probably Mitchell B. Reiss ‘79, adviser to Mitt Romney.
Governor Mitt Romney, looking to bolster his foreign policy experience as he prepares for a 2008 presidential run, embarks Sunday on a week-long trip to Asia, making stops in Japan, China, and the Korean Peninsula, where he will tour the demilitarized zone that separates North and South Korea.
Romney has made economic competition from Asia a centerpiece of his stump speech, often warning that the United States is falling behind the Far East in educating the scientists of tomorrow, a trend he believes will threaten America’s position as a economic and military superpower.
…
The trip is being paid for by Romney, not the commonwealth, Fehrnstrom said. Traveling with Romney will be Bob White, a close friend of the governor’s from Bain Capital who’s been instrumental in raising money for Romney’s political career, and Mitchell B. Reiss, a former director of policy planning for the US State Department who is now a vice provost at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va.
Previous EphBlog coverage of Reiss here. If not Reiss, then who?
PIRG at Williams
What is the current status of MassPirg at Williams? Stories like this one explain why I have been fighting against the use of Williams funds for this rip-off for two decades. Previous EphBlog coverage here.
Eph News
Many thanks to all the comments and suggestions with regard to our Eph News project. Per usual, I have dropped the ball and done nothing. Until today! To the right, you can see a new link to Eph News.
For now, this doesn’t do much. All we get are the results of a search in Google News for:
“Williams College” OR “Chris Murphy” and Congress
Still, it is a start. Now, we need to convince someone like Ronit Bhattacharyya ‘07 to take ownership. He (or someone else) can easily redirect this link to a more full featured solution.
Krissoff Summary
Thanks to Todd Gamblin ‘02 for suggesting that we add a link to all posts which refer to 1st Lt Nate Krissoff, USMC ‘03. We have added the link, which retrieves every relevant post. The link will stay until the Williams Memorial for Krissoff. I believe that this is scheduled for January, but I don’t have further details.
Those interested in the outlook of Marines like Krissoff during the holiday season may enjoy “A Soldier’s Christmas,” reprinted below.
Not All That Liberal
California conservative Republican Bill Simon [class of 1973] has begun building a network of support in the Golden State for the prospective presidential campaign of his old boss, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Simon, son of the late Secretary of the Treasury William Simon, was Republican nominee for governor of California in 2002. He was a prosecutor working for Giuliani, then U.S. attorney in New York City, in 1986-88.
Simon has been arranging get-acquainted meetings for Giuliani with prominent California conservatives to show them he is not all that liberal and really is a Republican.
“Not all that liberal?” Hmmm. Bug or feature?
Ohnemus ‘04 At Sea
Speaking of interesting new blogs, comes now Dan Ohnemus ‘04 with a travel blog live from the edge of the world.
After two six-hour flights and a three-hour layover at LAX, we’re finally here in Honolulu! All of our luggage arrived too, including a checked bag containing some pretty important reagents frozen on dry ice this morning at 3 am. They’re now happily frozen in my hotel fridge.
Ohnemus will be sailing around the South Pacific during much of January, studying ocean life as part of a team led by Dr. Zackary Johnson of the University of Hawaii. The official team Web site (with Q&As, journals, scientific explanations and such promised) looks to be here, but Ohnemus will be doing separate updates.
(Big h/t Drew Newman ‘04)
Five Things
Five things you did not know about Dan Drezner ‘90. Not so interesting. More fun would be a Record article on the same theme with Williams administrators.
Feeling Green
Mike Crotty ‘04 feels green.
A number of Michael Crotty’s fellow Williams College graduates have good jobs, some much better than others. But plenty of those in the Class of 2004 would trade places with Crotty in a heartbeat.
That’s because Crotty, who was a standout guard at Williams during his playing career, is in the middle of his second season as the director of player development with the NBA’s Boston Celtics.
A nice New Year story. There is a lot to be said for doing what you love.
Duquette ‘88 Gets No Credit
On this day [Spetember 15, 2006] two years ago, the Mets’ lineup card included Jason Phillips, Eric Valent, Wilson Delgado and Jeff Keppinger.
The manager, Art Howe, was about to be fired. The general manager, Jim Duquette, was about to be demoted. The team was 20 games under .500, having endured the worst homestand in its history and the kind of ridicule now reserved for the Knicks.
The Mets’ top prospect, Scott Kazmir, had been traded for an injured pitcher. The top young player, José Reyes, was out with the seventh injury to his lower body. One of the relievers, Mike DeJean, was out because he had been allowed to pitch on a broken leg.
Left fielder Cliff Floyd summed up the state of the Mets at the time when he said, ”There isn’t any light at the end of the tunnel right now.”
Two years later, the Mets can see all the bright lights of the postseason. They are on the verge of clinching the National League East and winning their first division championship in 18 years. As they head to Pittsburgh, their magic number is down to 1.
No matter how the Mets fare in the playoffs, they will be defined by the speed of their turnaround. Major League Baseball has seen teams go from last place to first place in a year, but rarely has an organization recast itself so thoroughly in such a short time.
But doesn’t Jim Duquette ‘88 deserve at least a little credit for the good season that the Mets had?
Photo ID, #63
This one’s a little weird, I admit.
Ficial
Coolest new Eph blog? Ficial by Chris Warren of OIT.
‘ficial’ is a not-word – one of those words that’s implied by other words but which doesn’t actually exist. For example, the word nonplussed (upset, taken aback, disturbed) implies the existence of plussed (content, happy, calm). Superficial is the anti-root of ficial
Read Chris on Blackboard.
The BB annual license fee is going up again. Not surprising.
It makes some sense, but with the decent and popular free options out there (moodle and sakai spring to mind) it seems like a dangerous move at first blush. However, it’s a balancing act. If they lose, say, 1% of their existing users over this, then they actually come out about 3.9% ahead with their 5% price increase. In this world where free software is an option a company will never get all the users. Some percent(x) of the users will use the company’s product, and the rest (100-x) will use something else. Say each customer is worth some value (v), then the company is trying not to maximize x, but x * v. It’s perfectly fine if x goes down as long as v goes up enough to compensate (and then some, ideally). It will be interesting to see as time goes on whether that balance point turns out to be 10,000s, 100,000s or 1,000,000 of dollars.
That being said, the free software seems to be getting better very fast, both from and end users perspective and from an administrators/installers perspective. Also, academia generally likes the idea of open source and free sharing – in many ways it’s what academics is all about. Unless BB starts providing a lot of functional improvements to go along with their price increases I think they could lose more customers than they expect over the next few years.
An academic institution like Williams should spend less money on software. Although a case can be made for a very few closed source applications, there is no plausible reason for something like Blackboard. Sounds like Chris is on the side of the angels on this one.
By the way, we still have one spot for a discussant in our Winter Study seminar. Perhaps Chris would be interested? He has clearly thought quite a bit about non-traditional forms of education, and it would be fun to have faculty/staff/alumni/students all represented in CGCL.
Mad Cow
The latest Mad Cow is out.
Do you think that the new building in the middle of campus looks kinda funny? Eager to be a part of the next master race? Want to know if you should visit London on an economy airline? Wonder what the Waffle Club is all about? Or do you just have uncomfortably many limbs?
No matter what you’re looking for, you can find potentially spurious information in the pages of the Mad Cow, in a dining hall near you. If you aren’t on campus, or are too sleep-deprived to read right now, don’t worry–there’ll be a fresh batch deployed after break.
But how about an on-line version for those not an campus? If a Mad Cowian (Mad Cowite? Mad Cowista?) would send us a pdf, we would be happy to post it.
An article about “next master race” reminds me about the 3/5th vote controversy of 5 years ago. Don’t remember that one? Unfortunately, since my suggestion to include some history in the Diversity Initiative Report was ignored, there is no handy summary of the controversy. Nor can I add a new entry to the Campus Controversies section of Willipedia on the topic since old-alum logins don’t work.
For background on the dispute, see Seth Brown. Gerry Lindo’s op-ed remains must-reading on the topic.
So it is with Williams: the minorities are accused of having chips on their shoulders and everything they say is treated as hyperbolic leftist blabber.
This is the most frustrating part of minority politics on this campus. Few recognize the good faith of the activists and the genuineness of their grouses. When the Mad Cow debacle was playing out, I and several other black folk were not too offended at first – some jokes were made in questionable taste, we were made uneasy and that was that.
This was all that I, personally, wanted to get across, so that the editors (one of whom I knew well) would understand and not repeat the incident. Basically, I hoped it would be a quick “we didn’t like that at all,” followed by “OK, sorry about that, we’ll remember next time.” This, of course, is not what happened. The greater part of the escalation was a refusal to simply acknowledge our position. By the time a few people finally got it, the chaos was already upon us. No one came in to hang the Mad Cow, but that is precisely what happened.
Neither the first time nor the last that this particular sequence will play itself out at Williams.
The new student center: Latest shots
Construction of the new Paresky Center (site of former Baxter Hall) is in its final stages. Three photographs of the building, taken during a recent hardhat tour, can be browsed here.
The Graying Professoriate?
One of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2007, if Dave will have me given our wildly divergent world vews and periodic contretemps, is to write a bit more for Ephblog. We’ll see how long this resolution lasts.
Today’s Boston Globe has an article on the graying of the American professoriate. The debate comes down to a fundamental question: Does the increasing prevalence of over-70 professors limit job opportunities for younger scholars?
Any young professor, and perhaps more to the point, any young unemployed scholar, is well aware of a largely mythical bubble of senior faculty who for decades, we have been told, have been poised to retire en masse, leading to jobs for all. But if these people are not retiring, where do the jobs come from?
The reality is a bit different. Yes, the abundance of retirement-created jobs has never materialized. But this is not what is costing opportunities to young scholars or professors who desire upward mobility within the profession. As America grows, so too does its need for places in community colleges, colleges, and universities. Blaming senior professors — almost always our most accomplished folks — is too facile by half.
Such a mindset also places blame where it does not belong. Administrators would love to believe that there is a simple supply and demand formula at work, and that if only senior professors (with their higher salaries and pools of research and travel monies) would retire there would be ambrosia for all. But those same administrators, especially away from the ranks of the elite colleges and universities, in the places where most professors teach and most students learn, are the ones most likely to countenance the outsourcing of higher education to hordes of adjuncts and visiting lecturers beholden to a miserably competitive job market.
There is another factor at work as well, and that is, in many disciplines, the overproduction of PhD students. Having a PhD program is a sign of belonging to (or of wedging one’s program putatively within) the ranks of the elite. A PhD program confers status. Professors want to teach in a PhD-granting department. Chairs want to head PhD-granting departments. Deans want to oversee as many PhD-granting departments as possible. VPs and Provosts and Presidents and Chancellors and Trustees (Oh MY!) want their universities and their university systems to be granting as many PhD’s as possible. The problem is that much of this pressure for producing PhD’s occurs independently of whether these PhD’s are able to go out and get jobs in academia or in the private sector. That is to say, too many departments are granting too many PhD’s without regard for whether or not there is an actual need for those PhD’s.
There is no easy solution to this last problem. It would be shortsighted and foolhardy for only a tiny, Ivy-covered elite to produce all of the PhD’s. And it would go against many fundamental principles of freedom and liberty to encroach upon either an institution’s desire to grant PhD’s or a student’s desire to receive one. Nonetheless, those departments that grant PhD’s ought to be looking closely at their job placement rates to determine if they are granting too many doctorates.
Think about our own experiences as students in thre Purple Valley. Williams has had enough legendary professors whose classes we have taken. Surely none of us would want to jettison some of Williams’ most senior treasures in the vague hopes that a new generation of scholars need their shot and will prove as enduring as their predecessors. (Furthermore, I’ve seen no sign that Williams is not doing a fine job of balancing senior folks with vibrant junior faculty members.)
The graying of the professoriate — which seems to me to be a concept that arose independent of much evidence but that contains an idea too rich not to run with — is not a serious problem. The real dilemma is the lack of imagination at work among the people whose jobs it ought to be to have an imagination about the way higher education functions rather than simply to find new ways to count beans.
Williams History on the Web
For those of you who don’t get Ephnotes, this site features some very interesting historical anecdotes and photos, as well as some great commentary on a few of Williams’ architectural disasters (generally during the 1960’s and 1970’s, although I also love the Hopkins Mall comment).
Here is one other interesting college-maintained page — you can see the historical costs of every construction project on campus.
Life on Hold
More coverage of the funeral of 1st Lt Nate Krissoff ‘03, USMC.
When terrorists struck the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, former Reno resident Nathan Krissoff put his life on hold to protect his nation.
A Truckee native, Krissoff died Dec. 9 from wounds sustained in a roadside bombing in Iraq’s Anbar province. The first lieutenant was 25 and a Williams College graduate who put his international affairs career on hold to join the military.
“He would not and could not stand idly by,” Marine Corps Capt. Michael Dubrule said Saturday during a memorial service for Krissoff in Reno. “The Marine Corps was a place where Nate could give back to his country and make a difference. Nate did make a difference.”
The standing-room only crowd filled Nightingale Concert Hall on the University of Nevada, Reno campus, where Krissoff was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart. The 90-minute service included “God Bless America,” the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and the Jewish mourners’ kaddish — a solemn prayer. Law enforcement motorcycles escorted the hearse carrying the flag-draped coffin to Mountain View Cemetery.
During the memorial at UNR, Krissoff was remembered as a charismatic leader and a “modern-day knight” dedicated to protecting the Constitution. The names of presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower were mentioned in remembering Krissoff.
After college and while working in Washington, D.C., Krissoff interviewed with the CIA but was told by the agency he was “too young,” says a memorial service program handed out Saturday. “… Being deeply affected by the events of 9/11, he decided that he wanted work on the front line in the Global War on Terror.”
Commissioned as a second lieutenant in August 2004, Krissoff was with the 3rd Marine Division, where he served as a counterintelligence officer. And Gov.-elect Jim Gibbons noted to mourners Saturday that Krissoff was sent to Iraq on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Acting on intelligence not long before his death, Krissoff helped save the life of an older Iraqi man from insurgents, Gibbons said. Stories like this from Iraq “rarely” make it into the mainstream media, said Gibbons, a combat pilot in the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars.
The Marines credit Krissoff with coming up with “pinpoint intelligence” information against “an enemy that hides behind civilians.”
This resulted from fact-gathering “up close and personal and often in the most dangerous places,” said Dubrule, the Marine captain who read comments from soldiers serving with Krissoff.
“Nate knew the danger, and he stepped in readily. His efforts helped save the lives of Marines, sailors, soldiers and innocent Iraqis.”
Krissoff was the son of Dr. and Mrs. William Krissoff and attended Roy Gomm Elementary School and Darrell Swope Middle School in Reno. He later attended Stevenson prep school in Pebble Beach, Calif., where he was a standout athlete.
He graduated from Williams in Massachusetts, where he earned a political science degree and was captain of the men’s swim team. He landed a job with an international studies institute in Washington before joining the Marines.
“I think the thing that is most telling about his character is the fact that this is a young man with a whole lot of options available to him, and he wasn’t looking to learn a trade or a skill,” Dubrule said after the memorial. “He wanted to serve and give back to his country. That should be pointed out whenever you talk about Nathan Krissoff — that he was there for the right reasons.”
Condolences to all.
Sarah Hart-Unger ‘02 provides an update.
Dan Blatt ‘85 remembers President Gerald Ford.
Ridin’ Dirty
Why isn’t this movie of a Good Question performance available on YouTube? (The audio is crystal clear but I couldn’t get the video to work.)
Heroically Composed
Todd Gamblin ‘02 writes:
We are also planning to make him a shadowbox with a folded flag, all of his medals, his Williams swimming and polo caps, a plaque, and other mementos.
The news report is accurate, and the concert hall was standing room only. The procession to Mountain View mortuary was also incredibly packed. As Nate’s father said to me, the overwhelming response is entirely due to Nate, and I think the number of people who came to his service does him more justice than anything I could say here. A remarkable number of swimmers (including myself) made it out on short notice. To give you an idea, one swimmer came all the way from China to see Nate. Two others, after missing the last flight out of New York on the 22nd, took a late flight to Sacramento and drove the rest of the way overnight.
The Krissoffs were heroically composed during the services, and don’t ask me how, but they knew everyone by face. They recognized me even though I don’t believe we ever met while I was at Williams. I hope that the overwhelming support made them at least somewhat happier in
knowing what kind of son they had. I was proud to be there to help
with what I think was the best send off we could have given Nate, and
it was totally deserved.
Other comments welcome.
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