Tue 10 Apr 2007
There was a Williams event in LA two months ago. It was called RoadScholars and featured, among others, Sam Crane.
I just finished watching the sun set over the Pacific Ocean from the window of my hotel room in sunny and warm LA.
I am here to give a talk - actually I will give the same talk twice - on political change in China to a group, a fairly large group, of alumni from Williams College. There are several other faculty members here with me to give other talks. It will be quite a circus of academic performance! It all lasts one day, tomorrow, but should be pleasantly intense.
Here are some of the thoughts I will toss out tomorrow.
Kudos to Williams for holding such events and to Sam for blogging about them. But why is it so hard for the rest of us to find out any details? Where is the speaker list? The program? The slides? Why must Williams be so insular so much of the time?
Ah, well. The RoadScholars appears to be a program with some staying power. When will the College learn that transparency creates success?
2007-04-10 13:36:33
Apparently the Feb 3 event (in Chicago) and the Feb 24 event (in LA) were both advertised on the web at http://www.williamsroadscholars.com. I punched this address into Google, and was able to retrieve the progams, speaker lists, etc. for both events out of Google cache.
Apparently they took the info down after the events were over. They are now advertising the latest event, which will occur in Williamstown in July.
As you might expect, alumni in the southern California area got direct mailings about the LA event.