Walk Me Home
It is autumn, the time of year when I am most in love with the world, happiest to live in the northeast, and most prone to daydreaming. I walk and imagine that, once upon a time, this was the season when communities gathered in the town square to celebrate the harvest over spiced drinks, firelight and dancing, fueled by the special vigor that only an impending potentially deadly winter can generate.
Last year was the most beautiful autumn of my remembered life: it began for me with a visit to Ann Arbor when its leaves began to change, a return to be outdoors for class three days a week in Ithaca, and then home to catch New York’s peak during Thanksgiving (I took a very long walk in the golden parks). I anticipated the season again eagerly this year, when I live on Cornell’s campus. Fall came earlier this year and it seems unlikely that New York will be as beautiful when I come home, but I am hoping against reason that I am wrong (can anyone there please let me know? Are the maples yellow now or bare?) I have been looking forward to Thanksgiving since September. Some of my most sacred rituals of the year are getting a haircut and walking my neighborhood the morning before, the dinner with my extended family at grandpa’s, and a football game in the park with high school buddies I see that day only the day after.
This season I have enjoyed a daily walk across the prime parts of Cornell’s famous campus. Today, I invite you along.
Cornell’s Letter on Financial Situation
Our Morty is President Skorton. Yesterday he sent the letter below. Awfully familiar, though note the electronic “suggestion box” for ideas they have set up for how to solve the financial problem.
Literally, Once In A Lifetime: The Ghost Orchid
Am I the first Williams graduate ever to see this ultra-rare bloom in person? The ghost orchid, while perhaps not as rare as the most obscure of plants (some species are down to numbers in the dozens), it sits at that ultra-sexy nexus of rare and alluring. It is considered by many to be the most sought-after orchid in the country, world famous for its elusiveness and ethereal beauty.
About a month ago, near the end of my work at the Fairchild Tropical Garden in Coral Gables, FL, I took advantage of my closeness to some of the (very friendly) botany graduate students there to combine forces with one of them. Brett, a tropical botany Ph.D. candidate at Florida International University, had been seeking the orchid as a hobby for five years. He knew where to look; I had a good camera and closeup photography knowledge. We set out one Saturday morning for the Fakahatchee Strand, the only place in the country where the orchid grows (the only other habitat in the world is in Cuba). I have heard that the world’s estimated population is 2,000, but the locations of only a couple hundred are known. Their locations are not made public, to discourage poaching, and only 5-10% bloom every year. Since an unblooming ghost orchid occupies a surface area about the size and color of a single sycamore leaf in a dense jungle, the odds of finding one are infinitesimal.
For the full story and sights from this small but famous swamp natural preserve, read on.
Why We Don’t Serve
There is a line I hear from anti-war people who believe they can neatly separate their condemnation of the war from criticism of the volunteers in our army: “I support the troops; I don’t support the war.” Hearing this said has always bothered me deeply because the dual sentiment seems truly impossible to have unless one believes that either 1) The soldiers fighting today are somehow compelled or otherwise there against their better judgment, or 2) The soldiers fighting today fight willingly and chose to willingly, but only because they were somehow “duped” by their superiors.
One cannot believe that members of our armed forces fight in part because they were compelled or tricked, without taking something away from their choice to serve.
More to the point that is crucial for us to wrestle with now, before the troops come home: if either of the above is a belief about reasons for serving and those who serve that lurks quietly in your heart, I beg that you confront it before the end of this war. Was it Jeff that mentioned the term cognitive dissonance? Can anyone imagine the cognitive dissonance that will occur if 130,000+ soldiers return home to a population that offers, “Thank you for your service. Personally, though, I wish no one had had to do what you did, and I believe you and others like you were the victims of trickery”? I am glad that Americans at large recognize the need to not repeat the end of Vietnam, but in my mind we are a lot closer to that danger than we realize when we “support” the troops but have as much understanding for the decision to serve as is given in
If you want your kids to do good NOW, have them join the Peace Corp or something. I don’t understand why any rational parent with kids who have great alternative options (as almost any Williams grad does) would encourage their kid to join the military so long as this administration is in place. Hence, unsurprising that hardly anyone does.
Jeff’s language above is likely careless, in that it states “I don’t understand . . . hence, unsurprising that hardly anyone does.” I don’t think he meant to say that, but it is a slip that is telling about the “me, therefore everyone” way we all think, a way that will be dangerous to our society in the very near future. We think that, because you and I see nothing to die for in a given context, no other rational being possibly could.
If you, for some reason, have an interest in how I think, read below the break. It is extremely long.
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Continuing Discussion on Textbook Use
What began as a follow-up comment to our recent discussion about textbooks at Williams got rather long. As I confessed in that thread, this is a topic near and dear to my heart: I was a student on hefty financial aid, and while my parents would have paid for books or I could have afforded them myself, the cost of books had I bought all new and all “required”
editions would have exceeded the sum of my spending on all other things over the same period of time. This includes travel, entertainment, restaurant meals, whatever. Once your room and board are paid, it is possible to live frugally at Williams, and I did.
That’s not some kind of crazy boast(?), it is just an effort to put this discussion into perspective. Knowledge is nearly priceless. A good, unduplicated reference in a subject you care about is worth its weight in gold, and it would be crass of me or others to argue that I and other students scrimp on books in order to, say, go snowboarding over Winter Study. But should we, as Uible suggested, regard buying the newest editions a “petty matter” to be “treated by the students as merely a surcharges on tuition”? I answer, emphatically, no.
Below the break are my thoughts on this matter, derived from an experience with the topic that is arguably as broad as a student could have, beginning literally before my first day of classes, when I went to the 1914 Library seeking my first textbook: Saul Kassin’s 3rd edition of Psychology.
Erin Burnett Breaking News
She is coming on The Celebrity Apprentice on CNBC at this very moment.
I’m not in on the whole Erin craze or this show, but I happen to have heard her name flipping through and I sense some of you might really like to know this.
“Population Shift Sends Universities Scrambling”
An article by this headline in today’s Washington Post discusses an impending decline in high school graduates next year “in many parts of the nation” and a significant shift in the racial composition of classes applying to colleges. We’re not talking about a nationwide shift yet, if ever, but as is the case in all heterogeneous dynamic systems, interesting effects will hit specific cross sections of universities first. My favorite quote in the article:
Schools in more remote areas, with fewer resources and no particular academic focus, could struggle, said Steven Roy Goodman, an educational consultant and admissions strategist. That is why the 700-student Northland College in Wisconsin uses its location on Lake Superior to promote it as “the environmental liberal arts college.”
“To use the obvious ecological metaphor, we must specialize in our niche, because we can’t compete with dramatically better-resourced generalists,” Provost Rich Fairbanks said.
I generally find comparisons to ecosystems pretty sexy. My experience tells me there are amazing parallels between organization identity and organism niche that make the lessons of one apply quite neatly to the other more often than would be apparent. I still remember the graphs of biotic population dynamics I encountered in my advanced ecology class at Williams that showed that stable coexistence of organisms was only possible when their specializations were sufficiently disparate. It’s a story of competition-management that plays out all over, from the small colleges of Wisconsin, to the SLACs of the Northeast, to botanical gardens sharing a climate zone and region.
Learning from History: The Social Honor Code Proposal of 2004
Readers may recall that I have made the point a few times that, when it comes to social issues, controversies, and student self-governance at Williams, there is a certain circularity that seems to escape the notice of most on campus. The last time I wrote on this it was to cover 2007’s resurrection of the idea to “lock down” campus dorms to non-residents after a certain hour, in the name of descreasing vandalism. This same idea had been almost foisted on students four years ago, nearly to the day. Thankfully, Security showed forbearance in 2003, and student voters showed good sense in 2007.
The present project of a large group of students to consider adopting a Social Honor Code is another case of nothing new, and as intrepid and proud of their work as today’s students rightly feel, I hope proponents and opponents alike are aware that their peer predecessors had the same concerns and solution. Once again, nearly precisely 4 years ago, a draft of a Social Honor Code was on the floor at College Council. Sabrina Wirth ‘05 was its author and main proponent, and she brought it to the floor during the 14 January 2004 Meeting of College Council. The text of her draft and the debate over it are recorded in the linked minutes from that meeting, and included below the break for (highly) interested readers.
Back then, the project was allowed to be forgotten. A number of people including myself volunteered to work with Sabrina on the project, but it was never followed up on, due to a combination of timing, disinterest or suspicion by some in Council, including myself. Then and now, I did not believe in implementing such a code, largely because I knew it would be actually enforced by the dean, and not what I considered a true representative body of the community. The ability to “enforce community standards” is the most broad and vague source of disciplinary power for the Dean, and I had no desire to see it strengthened.
I don’t at all wish to impose my views or arguments on the students of today, though I do hope this:
- Students will read Sabrina’s work and the discussions of their predecessor peers.
- Students will not make the interpretation of community standards the discretion of a dean, who is already the executor and need not be made judge or jury as well.
- If they draft a code, students make it one amendable by students alone. The Academic Honor Code is amendable only by faculty and, in this way, is not a good model for a code of the community. Only a tiny percentage of the faculty are any meaningful part of the social community.
- The code be publicly deliberated and voted on, and written records kept of all deliberations. All of this will be crucial to properly implementing and revising such a code in the future.
Awful as scrawling “nigger” is, arguably worse incidents took place shortly before and after Sabrina’s code proposal, and it was not taken up by enough believers to continue her effort. I’d have to bet on the side of the idea of this code being eventually dropped—doing it right would take so much time and thought, and doing it wrong would be awful—but if a code is implemented, one thing is certain: administrators now and ever after will describe it as a mandate, as “the restrictions students convened to place upon themselves.”
They had better be smart ones. When you hand over the freedom to determine community standards informally—through public shame and subtler private mechanisms—no one ever hands it back to you.
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What I’d Really Like to See: Improving the give2williams Website
So I just got poked by my good friend, cribbage nemesis, and class agent/secretary Zach who reminded me I hadn’t given to Williams this year yet. To get my attention, he actually joked that I earmark my donation for everything David Kane decries, and furthermore said he’d specified his go towards restoring the Odd Quad to its pre-Neighborhoods glory. Unconventional as it may seem, he got my donation . . . but when I popped over to give2.williams.edu I got to thinking . . .
As I sat there for an inordinate amount of time wondering which digit to put in the ones column, I came up with an idea that I’d really like to see implemented on the giving site: live-updated, humorous, cleverly chosen giving levels based on my intended gift. If you’re into fundraising, web development, or just (self-proclaimed) cool ideas, read on!
Bridge At Williams, 2001-2005 and after
When a friend forwarded me a link to the recent article in the New York Times spotlighting Williams Bridge, I was all revved up to make sure the story made it to ephblog. Who better to break the news than one of the club’s former devotees? Then I saw that it had already been linked—in an itty bitty mention at the end of Jeff Z’s Athletics Round Up. Well, Jeff, that just won’t do. This story is getting prime billing, and will be used as another excuse for me to deposit a few more Williams memories into this site, this time from the point of view of someone who learned and taught bridge at Williams and saw its level of play reach what I believe was a peak since its last heyday over a decade ago, maybe longer.
Mind you when I say “peak” I am using the term in the New England skiing context, or as a mathematician might say a “local maximum.” We’re still talking about bridge, and that means we weren’t ever packing Goodrich hall. But by my junior year, we did have enough interest to run both a beginner’s class during Winter Study and a handful of semesterly tournaments, not to mention get covered in a paper that, if not the Times, was still national news. We also always had weekly social bridge nights, which is really when most of the learning for everyone happened, and when all of the learning happened every year before we and Frank Morgan started teaching formal classes. For me, the “peak” of bridge was when social bridge night had a record attendance one night of 28 players: enough to pack two common rooms in Currier, with 7 simultaneous games, enough to be a fire hazard.
This is a picture from that night in January 2004. In the upper left is a table of people who had just learned that night, mingled with Dave, shuffling, who was in Morgan’s class at the time. Top center you can see two players from the third game in the hall, the fire hazard. The foreground game was historic: Elaine is holding up and pointing to the strongest hand I have ever seen from a true deal. She herself had 20 high card points and a void, translating to an ability to take at least 8 tricks out of 13 all by herself (the average hand in bridge takes about 3 tricks. A hand of Elaine’s value is dealt 8 out of every 1000 deals). Her partner had over ten high card points, which meant they were able to take all 13 tricks, called a “grand slam.”
What follows is a “brief” overview (think Ken Thomas brief) of bridge at Williams and after, as I know it.
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