Tue 29 May 2007
Construction of the North Academic Building, part of the first phase of the Stetson-Sawyer project, is well underway. This building, which will contain approximately 110 faculty offices, several classrooms, a language lab, the college’s first archaeology lab, and other resources, is being built immediately to the north of Sawyer Library. You can see four pictures of the foundation work here.
Construction of the smaller South Academic Building begins after the close of Alumni Reunions. Safety fences will go up on or about June 11.
The good news is that both buildings should be completed by late summer 2008. At that point construction activities will move to Stetson Hall and the area immediately behind it, where they will be far less of an intrusion on normal campus life.
May 29th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
Let’s hope this thing goes more smoothly and quickly than Paresky, is way more successful than Sawyer was, and doesn’t make life miserable for residents of Lehman and the Dodd area and the Center for Environmental Studies.
May 29th, 2007 at 1:19 pm
Amen to that. So far, so good with respect to schedule. It’s been a tough period for students in Lehman and the Music faculty in Bernhard, but I don’t think that Dodd students have found the construction zone to be as big a problem as they feared. CES will be significantly affected by a move and substantial renovation of Kellogg, plans for which are being developed right now. By late fall, it’s likely that much of the NAB work will be shifting indoors, which should lessen the project’s noise impact a bit. But the SAB construction near Hopkins will pose challenges in September. These disruptions are regrettable, but as they say, you can’t make omelettes . . . .
May 29th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
Easy solution: Buy airconditioners for all the rooms in Lehman so they can keep their windows closed during the foundation and structural work.
May 29th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
Michael–who have you spoken to who has told you the construction isn’t a problem for Dodd residents? Sure, it’s not as bad as the construction in the early fall was, but it’s still pretty miserable…concrete trucks park in the Dodd quad and run their noisy motors for 30 minutes at a time, there always seems to be a construction vehicle backing up, and clouds of dust billow across the Dodd lawn, making it sometimes hard to spend a whole lot of time outside. I can’t tell you how many complaints about this construction I’ve heard and with the SAB beginning it sounds like it will only get worse.
I agree with HWC–something along the lines of air conditioners in Lehman (and a nice renovation for Dodd) are necessary. As long as people such as Michael delude yourself into thinking the construction’s not a huge problem, nothing sufficient will be done to alleviate its impacts on the Dodd Neighborhood. For once, listen to the CUL, the Dodd CC Rep, or the Dodd Governance Board: are in far better positions than you are to judge the construction’s impact on the student body, and all have spoken out strongly multiple times about the necessity for the administration to take active measures to decrease the impact of the construction on Dodd Neighborhood.
May 29th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
My understanding is that Lehman won’t be occupied during the summer, so the air conditioner proposal doesn’t get much traction. As for complaints, if Facilities and the Building Committee aren’t hearing these stories from Dodd residents, the CC, or whoever, then they are being voiced to the wrong audience. We track these concerns as carefully as possible–clearly much more carefully than Current Eph imagines–and try to develop remedies when they are feasible
All that said, it’s in the nature of construction that people are inconvenienced. The faculty is taking a significant hit, too: several good classrooms have been taken off line because of the construction noise, and the Music faculty are a heck of a lot closer to the construction than are Dodd residents.
May 29th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
The air conditioners would have addressed the noise and dust issues in Lehman during May, Sept, October, etc.
May 29th, 2007 at 10:56 pm
I’m worried about the library books, which I understand are being moved into storage off-campus for a fairly long time. Sure, students can call up books if they know the specific titles and/or subject, but there’s something magical about walking through the stacks, just browsing. I’m afraid the spontaneous connections inspired by meandering through real-life books could be lost.
May 29th, 2007 at 11:38 pm
Solution: take only science and math classes. Schow’s not going anywhere. :-)
May 30th, 2007 at 12:37 am
Current eph — If you ever find yourself wondering why the faculty doesn’t seem responsive to student input or particularly solicitous, part of the reason may be the blithe expressions of insolent ingratitude. Michael — that ought to be “Professor Brown,” to you — is likely neither deluded nor deaf. And while he is far too kind and indulgent to say so, being lectured by an anonymous spoiled twenty year old is not much encouragement for posting on ephblog.
May 30th, 2007 at 2:08 am
I’m not feeling the student/faculty love in this thread…
May 30th, 2007 at 3:02 am
“spoiled”? Really? Do you consider all of your students to be spoiled brats, or just the ones who don’t like being woken by the incessant, piercing beeping of trucks backing up at 7AM every day for months?
I’m sure Prof. Brown is a nice guy who genuinely cares about student concerns, but that doesn’t mean current eph’s point is invalid - the construction is *really* difficult for Dodd residents, possibly more so than Prof. Brown has realized, and it’s a major reason that Dodd is considered to be by far the least desirable neighborhood right now. The neighborhood system loses a lot of legitimacy when the administration shows that it doesn’t seem to care about maintaining even some facade of equality between the neighborhoods.
May 30th, 2007 at 6:15 am
Just for the record: when classes are in session, construction work begins at 8 AM, not 7, out of consideration for students in nearby dorms. If this is too early for some, it’s worth pointing out that Williams still schedules classes at 8, and many employees report to work at that hour or, in some cases, earlier.
I confess that I’m scratching my head over the proposal that the College should more equitably distribute the inconvenience associated with its construction projects. I suppose that we could initiate randomly distributed jack-hammering in the interests of fairness . . . .
As someone who has survived a recent home renovation that, among other things, forced me and my wife and daughter to seek temporary quarters for six weeks, I can attest that construction is perfectly awful. But then it’s done, and life begins anew. Looking at how Peresky has quickly woven its way into daily life at Williams, it’s already hard to remember the inconvenience that accompanied its creation. This time next year, we’ll all be looking at two handsome new buildings on either side of Sawyer and contemplating the day, three years later, when Stetson Hall is restored to pride of place at the east end of a new green and the College will finally have a library that functions well. It will be a spectacular improvement in this quadrant of campus.
May 30th, 2007 at 10:38 am
Whoa, whoa, whoa. It’s “hard to remember the inconvenience that accompanied its creation?” Even construction aside, we all remember the inconvenience. Having to table in five different locations just to reach a reasonable number of students, having to trek from West to Driscoll or Currier to Mission to get mail, looking around Williams and seeing hundreds of students we don’t recognize because they ate in a different dining hall and we never ran into them, ever — these are “inconveniences” that we still remember, and will continue to remember.
It may be easy, as a professor, to forget the years without a student center — because it’s a student center, not a professor center — but the mark left on the students, especially the classes of 2007 and 2008, is indelible, not water-soluble.
May 30th, 2007 at 10:54 am
Upset at being awoken early doesn’t qualify one as a “spoiled brat.” Writing a snotty post to Prof. Brown qualifies one as a brat. Our current eph faculty member is right on.
And trek? How can any traverse of Williams College be deemed a trek. Williams becomes more a camp/day care center by the year. We like to quote our “Hopkins at one end of a log” but really everyone wants a spa.
This is precisely what happens when college students become “consumers.”
May 30th, 2007 at 10:55 am
Bring back fraternities! They were the centers for uninterrupted campus dining, mail gathering and other social activity by 90% of the student body and for uninconvenienced studying and lodging by 20%.
May 30th, 2007 at 11:10 am
this is now an official ephblog post: frank has posted that we should return to frats.
and all is right in the world:)
May 30th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
I still remember the inconveniences associated with the initial construction of Sawyer, yea all those many years ago. As an aside, the fact that the building is regarded as a failure certainly doesn’t make any sweeter the sacrifices the classes of ‘74 and ‘75 felt they made in order to provide for future generations of Williams students (and it doesn’t make any of the donors to that project or faculty members who were inconvenienced during that construction any happier either).
There will always be some tension in perspective between students and faculty on these matters. In virtually all cases, students’ careers in Williamstown are four years long at most; faculty members are often blessed with seven years or even much longer in the Purple Valley. Lack of a student center for much of those four years or having major construction in mid-campus during much of those four years may be no more inconvenient in the abstract for students than for faculty members but it must feel as though it has a greater impact because it takes up a considerably larger portion of a student’s career at Willams than a professor’s. And to be fair to the students, living and working near a construction area is harder than working near a construction zone but living elsewhere. Then, too, the students are paying to go to college (in a construction zone) and the professors are being paid to work (in a construction zone). We’d all do well to have a good deal of patience and sympathy for both sets of people, and let’s try to understand why the students might feel especially unhappy.
That said, I was delighted that Prof. Brown shared
plans and schedules with all of us on Ephblog. I saw that as opening and enabling dialogue, which I believe to be crucial to making the best of the situation. It also makes it lot easier for those of us who are Williams alumni and/or parents of Williams students to get on board with the project and to get excited about it.
So, thank you, Prof. Brown. Please come back often and talk with us.
May 30th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
And Prof. Brown, is there anything that can be done to address, at least in part, the concern that eph ‘11 raises (above) about the books? Here’s a new member of the community who sounds as though he/she has worries about a project that is going to be underway during his/her entire career at Williams. How do we bring the Class of ‘11 (who gain nothing from the construction of the new library, and get a lot of downside) into this series of projects in a positive way? Some people will always be disgruntled but my sense is that most of the pre-frosh desperately want to be happy at Williams and to love Williams.
May 30th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
I don’t understand the book problem. The schedule doesn’t call for the current library to be torn down until the new one is complete.
May 30th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
rory: Right on! More to come. I’ll try not to fail to remind that a half century ago Williams threw out the baby with the bath water in its deceitful, hard-ball-political, undemocratic, arrogant, control obsessed, ill executed, foolish abolition of fraternities.
May 30th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Frank, you could always stage a dark-horse run for the Board of Trustees, a la Dartmouth — which is well on its way to having a board majority from the old school, pro-fraternities and sports contingent.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/EDUCATION/05/25/dartmouth.trustees.ap/
(Kind of odd, by the way, that this article ends with with the quote about diversity, but fails to mention that Smith himself is black).
May 30th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
I’ll second the thanks to professor Brown, please keep the updates coming for the architecture / construction obsessed among us. I think this project, in particular, will well be worth it. It is in one fell swoop the realization of what should have been, from the get-go, the master plan for the center of campus. And once this is done, other than some relatively minor improvement of certain athletic facilities, I can’t imagine any major construction projects on the horizon: the campus should be in great shape for a generation of students.
May 30th, 2007 at 3:42 pm
I’m trying to figure how it would be possible to use the word “diversity” in an article about Dartmouth’s Board.
With the election of Smith, the Board is now 15 men and three women.
May 30th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
Jeff: In regard to your jocular suggestion I have always responded with a paraphrase of William Tecumseh Sherman’s well known quote concerning his possible candidacy.
June 1st, 2007 at 7:10 pm
Let me third the thanks to Professor Brown. This is just the sort of stuff that draws a thousand or so readers (mostly students and alumni) to EphBlog each day.
I would recommend a weekly update, say every Tuesday, or whatever day is most convenient for Professor Brown. I realize that there is not new material or news on a weekly basis, but there are many interesting pages on the main Stetson-Sawyer site, pages that our readers are interested in knowing about and discussing, pages which also benefit from a little context and background.
Of course, readers could just read those pages right now, since Michael has kindly provided a link. But readers are lazy, like me! They like to be spoon-fed things in drips and drabs.
I hope that Michael will provide us with more highlights.