Professor Annemarie Bean taught at Williams for several years but was denied tenure in 2005. (And note that this denial was never reported by the Record.) Fun-filled EphBlog threads that mention Bean are here, here and here. What happens to professors in many/most of the humanities if they don’t get tenure at Williams? Little good. The New York Times provides an update.

A single mother, 42, with a 10-year-old daughter and an 8-year-old son, Bean found herself unemployed. When we met for health food in June, she was not sure what would come next. “I’m going on unemployment starting July 1,” she told me. “I am selling my house in West Hartford. I have an open house tomorrow, because I can’t afford the mortgage payments.” In July, she and her children moved to Bennington, Vt., where they now live with her boyfriend.

Of course, not every professor in the humanities who leaves Williams is forced into such dire straights. Most continue to teach, but at lesser schools and for lower pay. Most will never be as comfortable and prosperous as the tenured colleagues that they leave behind in Williamstown.

The article covers the debate over the use of student evaluations in college promotion/retention decisions. Did Bean’s student evaluations play a big role in her tenure-denial at Williams? I don’t know. If the College wants to have more African-American faculty, then it makes little sense to have a white professor teach courses in Africana Studies. (See Evelyn Hu-DeHart’s discussion in conjunction with the Diversity Initiatives.) Would the College have tenured Bean if she were African-American? I don’t know. What about if she were an alum? (Note how three of the four tenures her year were alums. I can’t remember the last time an alum came up for tenure and was denied.) Again, I don’t know.

See below for excerpts from the article that mention Bean.
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Inspired by the “Good People of Williams” post (but not wanting my story to be lost in comments), I figured I’d write about Professor Dudley Ward Rhodes Bahlman. (Although to be fair, he went by the less formal “Dudley W. R. Bahlman”). Now that’s a name for a college professor. He looked the part as well. Easily 6′2,” he was a big man. Rumor had it that he’d played on the Yale football team. I never found out whether it was true, but he certainly had the build of a linebacker. A linebacker who wore three-piece suits to class; on his days off he’d wear a tweed sportscoat or a Shetland sweater.

Between the name, his build, and the way he dressed, he was an imposing man. So it was with some trepidation that I sat down in his class, my first class in my freshman year at Williams: History 101. “Good morning, class,” he started. “My name is Professor Bahlman. It’s not ‘Dudley’ or ‘Dud’–it’s Professor Bahlman. You will be ‘Mr. Creese’ and ‘Miss Coolidge.’ Maybe when we all die and go to that big Heaven in the sky I’ll be Dud and you can be Chip or Buffy, but in this class we will address each other formally. Is that understood?” We all gulped and nodded.

“Now, you’ll notice that I walk around a lot in class,” he said, striding forcefully back and forth across the front of the room in Greylock. “I have a lot of energy and I find it useful. I used to twirl my pocket watch on the end of its chain, but the chain let go one day and beaned a student. Knocked him out cold. Took several minutes to bring him around. So now I just walk back and forth.” Once again we gulped and nodded.

I learned a lot from him, but two lessons stand out. The first paper we had to write for him was a five-pager answering the question, “Was World War II inevitable?” Like many students at Williams, I had been a straight A student in high school. Needless to say, I was shocked when I got the paper back with a big “C+” on it. Everyone else was pretty much in the same boat, so the general demeanor in the class that day was total disbelief.

He started out, “I suspect that many of you are disappointed in your grade–as well you should be. Frankly, many of the papers were not well argued. It’s fair to say that your first mistake was to answer the question I posed.” We’re looking at each other, going, “Huh? What was that again?” He went on. “Look at how I posed the question: ‘Is World War II inevitable?’ You need to qualify the question. Inevitable when? In 1935? In September 1939? Furthermore, the word ‘inevitable” is a trap. It’s too absolute. You should have started your paper by saying something like, ‘I will answer the question, “Was World War II inevitable?” by answering the more specific question: “At the beginning of December 1941, was it probable that the U.S. would have eventually entered World War II, even if Pearl Harbor hadn’t happened?”‘ Remember, it’s your paper; you’re in control of what you write. Don’t blindly follow the professor over a cliff.”

Thirty-seven years after that class the lesson is still burned into my brain: Recast the question if necessary.

My junior year I took Professor Bahlman’s class on Victorian England and learned yet another lesson. He was a big believer in making us read “the definitive works,” some of which were quite dry. We had a quiz at the start of class one day and although most of us did pretty well, the entire class was stumped by one specific question. (We all compared notes during the break, since it was a three-hour class.) We ganged up on him once we got back in class, all of us claiming that that we’d never seen that answer in the assigned reading. “Ah,” he said, his eyes sparkling. “That was in the footnotes. You should always read the footnotes.”

I carefully read footnotes to this day.

Finally, to give a hint of his softer side, a story from outside of class. One Winter Study I did an oral history project about Williams during the Baxter and Sawyer administrations. I went around and interviewed faculty and staff who’d worked for Presidents Baxter and Sawyer, and Professor Bahlman was one of them, since he had served as Dean of the Faculty under Sawyer. At one point he got onto recounting some student pranks during the 1960s, and made the comment, “You know, I think students take themselves way too seriously these days. We haven’t had a good student prank in the past several years.”

Partly emboldened by his offhand comment–and somewhat distressed that the future Sawyer Library was being built without the obligatory construction sign listing the architect, construction firm, etc.–my roommates and I decided we would correct that omission. We created a large plywood sign, white with purple letters, that said, “Site of the Future Smilin’ Jack Sawyer Library.” We attached it to the fence surrounding the construction site in the dead of night (and got caught by Security in the process–but that’s another story). The sign suddenly appearing out of nowhere caused a minor sensation, since many people couldn’t figure out whether the sign was official or not. (We’d worked hard to make it appear professionally done.) Its appearance was written up in the Williams Record, and the college sent a picture of it to alumni in a newsletter, attributing the sign to “student humorists.” Several days later, I ran into Professor Bahlman at a hockey game as I was scooting past him to get to a seat. He looked down at my sneakers with dabs of paint on them, smiled, and said, “That’s an interesting shade of purple paint, Mr. Creese,” and winked.

In my mind, a great professor.

A very nice obituary was published on Hank Payne in The Boston Globe over the weekend. The part I liked was the fact that he had started taking piano lessons:

“He had this sort of infectious desire to learn that manifested itself in him, and by example in other people,” Johnson said. “I tell people he’s the kind of person who takes piano lessons at 59. He took up piano lessons just like a first-grader. I told that at the graveside service, and a woman walked up after and said: ‘I want to introduce myself. I’m the piano teacher.’ I said, “Was he doing well? And she said, ‘Very well.’ “

Another nice comment was:

“He would have a national search [at Woodward Academy] and could get the very best,” he said. “People would come from wherever they were because they wanted to work for Hank Payne. People loved to work for him because they learned so much, and they loved to work for him because he had such a light touch in terms of management style.”

Other comments I’ve seen over the past several days include:

Nancy McIntire said, “He was a wonderful boss. I liked working with him a lot. He was very accessible. He had a wonderful sense of humor. And he was very, very smart.”

‘Here is this bright, funny, thoughtful guy, great job, broad interests, lovely family; he’s got everything going for him,’ ” said Jane Leavey, the Breman Museum’s executive director.

“I tell people I never in my life met anybody who was that smart who was as modest, self-effacing, fun,” said Johnson, the managing partner of the law firm Alston & Bird.

In startlingly annoying equation form:

Sensational incident + prosecutor up for election - reportorial standards x ( crusading ex-Williams professor + contrarian former Spy honcho ) = Major, Major Dap in New York Magazine article.

Prof. Johnson’s money ending:

People assume he’s a right-winger. “I’m a registered Democrat who has never voted for a Republican in my life.” Not that he doesn’t wildly speculate–he is a blogger … For the past few years, I’ve tended to roll my eyes when people default to rants about the blindered oafishness or various biases of “the mainstream media” in general and the Times in particular. At the same time, I’ve nodded when people gush about the blogosphere as a valuable check on and supplement to the MSM–but I’ve never entirely bought it. Having waded deep into this Duke mess the last weeks, baffled by the Times’ pose of objectivity and indispensably guided by Johnson’s blog, I’m becoming a believer.

Hoo-hah. Not half bad.

Former faculty member Brian Duchin is currently on a boat. His boat. Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Brian, and a crew that includes his son Sam, are participating for the second time in the bi-annual Vic-Maui yacht race. They sailed from Victoria, BC yesterday, and will arrive in Maui in a couple of weeks.

Two years ago, with a different boat but the same name, they won their division and also the coveted “Crew Having Too Much Fun” award. If you remember Brian, this should not come as much of a surprise.

You can track their progress here. Daily updates from the boat are here.

Tsk, tsk. A former Williams campus life staffer is sweating under the light and heat of FIRE’s Torch.

Apparently our former Campus Activities Coordinator, Rich Kelley (scroll down), has been actively assisting Heckler’s Vetos at his new home, Washington State University. FIRE’s entire coverage of this shameful incident can be found here.

Now the really interesting question is, “Why am I not surprised in the slightest?”

In contrast to WSU, Williams, as a private institution, is obviously not subject to FOIA requests. I wonder, however, if Kelley engaged in similar shenanigans while he was in the Purple Valley… and even if this were the case, how we’d even know.

It would be wonderful if somebody from the administration would take the time to look into his office’s expenditures and then assure us that that similar malfeasance didn’t occur during Kelley’s tenure in Williamstown… but I won’t hold my breath.