Responding to anonymous complaints is a fool’s mission. Perfect for me! Consider:

[A]s someone who’s spent a fair amount of time with the clc’s and who reads this blog only very rarely, but i was astonished to see all of the personal attention given to sara. i don’t think what she does is all that different from the other clc’s, i just think it might be getting a little more press. it’s hard for me to imagine that she’s robbing students of the ability to lead themselves… that seems like a huge overreaction.

you must have better things to do than spend this much time criticizing a very sweet, intelligent, hardworking, sincere woman who’s trying to make the campus a better place.

Think I am overreacting (and too lazy to read previous commentary)? Your mistake! Blame students like former Record editor-in-chief Ainsley O’Connell ‘06. She (not me!) claims that:

“So out with the old and in with the new: If Williams were to stop changing, it would never be the same.” Those words, which I wrote in May 2004 as part of the Record’s farewell to Baxter Hall, paid fond tribute to the past and looked ahead to the promise of the future. “It’s a shame to see the old girl go,” the editorial read, “but at the same time, it seems a fitting testament to the way the College reinvents itself every year for 500 bright-eyed new Ephs.”

Two years later, with graduation just weeks away, I look back on that moment and wish I could recreate the hopefulness of that vision of Williams as a beacon and vehicle of positive growth. Instead, I am frustrated by many of the ways in which the campus has changed, most particularly the sudden prominence of the well-intentioned but detrimental Office of Campus Life, which is locked in a stagnating cycle of its own design. By in effect naming itself “the decider” when it comes to student life, the campus life office has alienated the College’s best leaders. As a result of this rift, the office has become inwardly-focused, self-promotional and deeply resistant to constructive criticism. Student life is student-driven no longer.

Read the whole thing, you silly anonymous reader. The more educated you are about the history of Williams, the more informed your opinion will be. There is no doubt that Sara Ansell is a “sweet, intelligent, hardworking, sincere woman.” But that fact, true as it may be, does not guarantee that the institution of CLCs improves Williams. O’Connell doesn’t think so.