Someone asked me whether, when a Williams faculty member who holds a named professorship takes emeritus status, another faculty member is then designated as holding the named professorship. I haven’t been paying attention, and I have no idea. I remember seeing professors referred to as, say “AB, ZY-XW Professor of Subject, Emeritus” (or “Emerita”) but it never occurred to me to look to see whether someone else was soon thereafter appointed “CD, ZY-XW Professor of Subject” while the former incumbent continued to hold the designation but on emeritus status.

I assume that some monetary grant goes with most named professorships. How does that work when the holder takes emeritus status? 

Williams has been profoundly fortunate in the various ways so many of its emerati professors have continued to teach, research, head special committees, and otherwise give to and promote the interests of the College. I think of Hodge Markgraf ‘52 (the Ebenezer Fitch Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus), as the epitome of that.

Congratulations to Professor Lewis who has won a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship!  They have been awarded since 1925 to those “who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.”

From the College’s press release:

The Fellowship will allow Lewis to complete the research and writing of “The Pietist Tradition in Town Planning.” “Pietist tradition,” Lewis explains, “is expressed in a half century of Utopian town building by varied separatist sects as the 16th-century Anabaptists, 18th-century Moravians, and 19th-century Shakers.” It is a tradition that is in parallel and in opposition to the ideal cities of the Italian Renaissance.  

His project “is to do justice to this neglected chapter in the history of idea,” Lewis said.  “It will show that Pietist architecture … was rooted in the scholarly and courtly centers of Europe — and reflects the fertile interaction of the Renaissance and the Reformation.”

He will spend some of his year’s leave from Williams in Germany, primarily doing research at the Moravian archives in Herrnhut, Germany. In the U.S. he will focus this year on the Moravian archives in Bethlehem, Penn.  

Lewis said the book will sum up the meaning of “the other urban tradition, and seeks to take the measure of the Pietist contribution to urban thought, and its role as a laboratory for social experimentation.”

Thought it would be nice to throw a little positive reflection on Williams out there for the day.  While I never had the good fortune of taking his classes, several of my fellow Ephs have been motivated to pursue their passion for art and architecture by Professor Lewis and others in the outstanding Williams College arts community.  Yet again I am reminded of how lucky I was to spend four years at Williams surrounded by such dedicated, talented, and creative individuals.  Bravo!

I was poking around on EphBlog looking for something, when I realized I’d never really looked at the Ephblog Quote Wall. Looking over it, I saw this:

In some respects what we say may never matter, yet history has proven time and again that there are sometimes cases where one voice has made a difference. The most successful of these though were always the ones who were compassionate in their cause and careful with their words. — M. Esa Seeglum ‘06

I’ll be honest that I have no idea what inspired this quote or who the author is (the link on the page was broken). But it lead me to reflect on my time at Williams and some of those who had inspired me. It also made me contemplate Larry’s suggestion that we might discuss people at Williams that had great influence on us, be it professors, fellow students, townsfolk, staff, or otherwise. I suppose this could be for the better or for the worse, but I’m hoping better. For any recently admitted students who have stumbled upon us, I hope this can give you a flavor of why we Eph Alums are so involved (sometimes overly so) in our alma mater. As you can see from this blog, our fierce loyalty involves sometimes equally fierce criticism because we want Williams to continue to improve. But I think it is safe to say that Williams has had a great impact on the lot of us, and it is good to periodically step back and remember why.

For me, there are quite a few people who had great influence on me, but I’ll start with one here. Professor Bill Darrow, Chair of the Religion Department and all-around great guy. Of course, he is a brilliant professor, but I had a number of brilliant professors at Williams. There was something extra in the way he managed to welcome students to explore complex questions, to challenge us and yet make us feel “safe” in some way to do it. He taught tutorials in his cramped office in the Stetson maze with books surrounding you on all sides, wearing what can only be described as “Cosby sweaters.” He was like a caring uncle or grandparent - but a really, really smart one. For those of you out there who know him, you’ll also recall his particular manner of speaking where his voice dropped when he made a point and how he would kind of look upward as he reached for words sometimes.

I came to Williams as a little overachiever, as most of us did. I didn’t do so well in my first Religion class - at least for me - and my confidence was shaken. Indeed, my first semester grades were my worst by far at Williams. But I was lucky enough to have Prof. Darrow as my advisor. He was encouraging, gently pushing me to still take his 300-level tutorial as a freshman the way I had originally planned (coming in, I had quite big plans for myself). What possessed me to think I could handle it, I don’t know. What possessed him to encourage me to keep going with it, I don’t know that either. It was remarkable. I was challenged every week, struggling with texts that I only partially understood, trying to put together a 10-15 page paper or critique another student’s each week, and I’m sure looking like a complete idiot. But it was one of the most valuable experiences of my time at Williams. I got through it, proved to myself I could stack up with other students despite the immense self-doubt I was feeling at the time. It also lead me to major in Religion, the subject where I, on average, had some of my lowest grades. But Professor Darrow convinced me that was okay, he was one of the first people to help me realize the value of just thinking, and thinking hard about things. There didn’t have to be a problem to solve, the pursuit itself was worthy - and the grades, while important, were not the best judge of a successful course.

I stuck with it, and “Papa D” continued to challenge me, and comfort me, through my time at Williams. During our senior major seminar for religion, the group of 10-12 of us spent Wednesday afternoons together at the top of Hopkins Hall discussing birth and death (yes, the actual topic of the seminar), and often staying late after class still discussing the issues. We also managed to use the Sixth Sense, Bladerunner, and the Neverending Story in our presentations in that class, showing the sense of humor he also exhibited toward us! He encouraged us to gather for lunch beforehand (and came to my co-op once for it, to my great thrill), to continue these discussions, to explore the flights of ideas hatched in the mind of 21-year-olds late in the afternoon.

It was his office I cried in the spring of my junior year when everything seemed for the moment to be falling apart around me. I was trying to serve on the JASC, had a suicidal first-year in my entry, a paper due in his class and another, some other student-activity related issue happening, and it was the first anniverary of an old friend’s death. I went in to ask for an extension on the paper (which he always gave to anyone), and ended up spending part of the afternoon there with him, the stacks of books, and a box of kleenex. He probably doesn’t even remember it, but his compassion reflected all that was good about the close student-faculty relationship at Williams to me.

I had the good fortune to serve as his TA in my final semester. When we talked about the job, he mentioned the value he saw in going back to those texts from Religion 101, the ones that he knew had given me so much trouble at the beginning. It was a way to complete the circle of my time at Williams. He actually thought about things like that - the full cycle of education and growth, and how it impacted his students.

Going forward in my life, I have sought to model that combination of encouragement and support - with a little push to challenge oneself. I also have to pause sometimes and remember the value of things that aren’t so task-oriented. Reading important books and thinking important thoughts are good things. So there is my (somewhat sappy) anecdote for you all about someone at Williams who influenced me. I hope that others will add their own posts in the commentary. And if you don’t, I’ll be forced to add more of my own!

So, I’m reading my local news website (KGW.com) and came across a story about how a class at Portland State made the Family Security Matters Second Annual “America’s Most Dangerous College Courses”. Ha, Ha, another nutjob think tank handwringing to get publicity. Then, I went to the site to see the full list, and I’m happy to say that dear old alma mater pulled in at number 9.

9. “Body Politics: Power, Pain, and Pleasure” at Williams College.

Feminist Professor Jana Sawicki has created a politically correct, Lefty gem with her Williams College course that promises to discuss such penetrating questions as, “If bodies and pleasures are historically and socially constituted within unequal power relationships, what can or should we do to transform them?” and “Is the body an inevitable source of resistance and rebellion?”

 

One look at the course description, and PC words and phrases just jump out at you: only academic Leftists use the terms “unequal power relationships.” Unfortunately, most students can’t decipher Lefty propaganda until after they graduate. Here’s a tip: stay out of this class if you want rational discussions on important political concepts that don’t have anything to do with feminist professors complaining about how the “man” tries to control “their” bodies. You’re likely to come out of this class dumb and brainwashed, and that is dangerous indeed. 

If you want to marvel in the full list, it’s right here I can’t say it’s a class that I would choose as an elective, but hey, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Reaction?

Today’s New York Times article on babka’s role in Chanukkah observance features the expert knowledge of Professor Darra Goldstein:

“Babka comes from baba, a very tall, delicate yet rich yeast-risen cake eaten in Western Russia and Eastern Poland,” said Darra Goldstein, a professor of Russian at Williams College. “A very elaborate babka was eaten at Easter.”

“It can include rose oil, lemon zest, bitter almonds, cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg, lemon, bergamot or rose water,” she said, “but the most basic one has the finest flour, yeast, milk, with a little sugar and lots of egg yolks.”

The Italians call their version panettone, the French baba au rhum, and the Viennese and Alsatians kugelhopf.

Jews called it babka, the diminutive of baba, and gave it their own twist when they came to the United States. They filled it with chocolate and lots of cinnamon and sugar, making it more like a coffee cake with a streusel topping. Although not a Hanukkah dish per se, chocolate babka is served by many families at Hanukkah, like other iconic Jewish dishes.

In both Polish and Yiddish, babka is a diminutive of baba, meaning old woman or grandmother.

“Babka, in its original form, was stout and round, just like grandmothers used to be before they went to aerobics classes and practiced yoga,” writes Arthur Schwartz, whose book “Arthur Schwartz’s Jewish Home Cooking” is due to be published in April by Ten Speed Press. (Ms. Goldstein feels this explanation may be apocryphal, though.)

Happy Chanukkah (in that or any other transliteration deemed appropriate) to all those observing or celebrating this year.

Teeming with humanity, the world’s biggest cities already swell at the seams, and there’s no telling how big they’ll grow during the next century. Or is there?

Breakthrough research on that very point, by Stephen Sheppard and his Williams College colleagues, was presented at the Bellagio conference. Using Landsat satellite images of a sampling of 120 world cities — one set taken around 1990, another around 2000 — they were able to show global cities’ dynamic form of growth — how much they move to the urban periphery (”outspill”), or find space inside (”infill”).

According to Sheppard, quoted in the Seattle Times, cities on average outspill seven times as fast as they inspill, which means a place like Shanghai will have to grow by 14 square miles each year according to current trends. If this new growth isn’t planned, well, watch out.

Good planning, for example, can recycle underused urban land, or schedule better use of expansion areas, to achieve much greater people-carrying capacity. Good planning can avoid some of the worst modern traffic jams, put public transit first, make walking and biking conven-ient, and preserve pockets of green space critical to humans’ physical and emotional health. … Sheppard sees a frightening tide of population growth enveloping cities. He urges they take their thousands of planning documents, too often focused on some ideal future, and update them to reflect realistic growth scenarios.

In similarly cheery news, Sheppard’s Economics Department colleague Jerry Caprio explains in the latest Miliken Institute Review just why China’s immature financial system is the Achilles’ heel of the post-communist economic miracle. Well, let’s just hope nobody shoots at it, then.

Former Williams professor K.C. Johnson gives us a nice hat tip on posting the notes from Farred’s ridiculous rant last week, and provides a lot more information (including audio clips, which must be heard to be believed), on the odious former and currently-visiting professor (and member of Duke’s infamously ignorant “Group of 88″) Grant Farred in his post “Friday with Farred“.

If Williams even extends an offer to this clownish parody of a racial-Marxist postmodern academic, let alone hires him, I will not give a single cent to the college until he is gone. In fact, I’m pretty sure that Jeff Zeeman ‘97 would be among the first to join me in starting an escrow fund, and I doubt that we’d have a hard time putting a serious dent in contributions to the college.

This is just bizarre, and wildly out of left field, but somebody clearly has a huge bone to pick with Prof. Jay Pasachoff.

NOTE — I am not opining on the veracity of these documents. If anything, they’re probably widely exaggerated, if not outright false. I’m only posting this link because I randomly stumbled across it on the web. I’m curious about the circumstances behind this (e.g., a store selling only 4 ebooks, one for free and the other three for $20 each about Pasachoff?).

Talk about random… and here I thought that I knew how to hold a grudge.

Art History Professor Michael J. Lewis is now blogging at Commentary Magazine’s new blog, Contentions. Interested readers can also view only Prof. Lewis’ contributions.

What began as a comment posted to the entry on Karen Merill’s impending deanship ballooned into a longer topic that I thought I ought to start a new entry for, to spare readers of comments there and because I have no interest in discussing the content of Merill’s history of Conservatism class.

What follows are a long, yet abbreviated form of my musings on the deanship at Williams, and a few records I’ve collected from the deanships of some that preceed Merill. I became interested in the role as I worked on CC and, from meetings with my dean and closely following (and trying to predict) her actions and opinions, learned a bit about the burden that a Williams dean carries.

(more…)

Prof. Mark Taylor shows up on the NYT op-ed page, arguing that religious correctness is simply the latest version of political correctness.

The chilling effect of these attitudes was brought home to me two years ago when an administrator at a university where I was then teaching called me into his office. A student had claimed that I had attacked his faith because I had urged him to consider whether Nietzsche’s analysis of religion undermines belief in absolutes. The administrator insisted that I apologize to the student. (I refused.)

My experience was not unique. Today, professors invite harassment or worse by including “unacceptable” books on their syllabuses or by studying religious ideas and practices in ways deemed improper by religiously correct students.

Read the whole thing for his conclusions. Was “the university where [he] was then teaching” Williams, or somewhere else? Those who know are invited to say.

Another good addition to the op-ed page by the recently promoted David Shipley ‘85.

. . . Education is partly a game which we agree to play, in which grades serve as tokens. . . . Most teachers (maybe all?) function as both “coaches” and “referees” in the game. As “coaches”, we think about grades, at least in part, as motivational tools. I think this is fine — so long as we also remain fair referees. If the referee is not perceived as fair, the game is undermined. . . .

We’ve recently been having a couple of discussions on Ephblog on good pedagogy, specifically how to criticize student work. Unfortunately, these have been less discussions than a not-unusual pitched battle between David Kane and the world, where David’s hastily-expressed prickly good intentions take on the more-hastily-expressed senses of discretion and decency of his readers.

We owe this topic a better effort if we want to not just read about, but talk about, what works and doesn’t work at Williams, and why. And though I believe Kane’s honest attempt at good criticism could have sparked a good discussion, I believe the sample of real criticism I can provide can be an even better touchstone.

Below the break is two long quotes, an exchange between myself and a professor over some work I’d produced. It is a real sample of real teaching through criticism at Williams, and his permission has been obtained to post his words here. I consider it the best I’ve received. It is both excellent criticism in itself as well as, most fortunately for us, a small treatise on pedagogical criticism.

I have personally benefited greatly from the thinking it conveyed to me. I hope it will inspire students to seek equally good exchanges, inspire professors whom I know think daily and deeply about how best to criticize, and spark among us a constructive discussion.

(more…)

Former Williams professor Grant Farred, now at Duke, asks the tough questions:

All of which, of course, begs the crucial question: What is it precisely that that these three players, and the lacrosse team in general, are “innocent” of? Racism? Underage drinking? Hiring sex workers under a false name? Homophobia? The abdication of a collective team - what happened was not a “mistake” but part of an older and widely known pattern of lacrosse behavior - and larger institutional responsibility for declaring public what precisely it is that Duke University represents?

Now if it’s me, and I see that three guys have been charged with a crime, and everything indicates they did not commit that crime, maybe I stick the word “innocent” in the toolbox for later. But that’s me.

Prof. David D. Perlmutter, who visited in Spring 2002 to teach “War In Images” (which was one of my very favorite courses at Williams) as well as “Pictures and Politics in the Twentieth Century” for the Art History grad students, is now blogging about the influence of blogs on political communications.

I have always appreciated the insightful, thoughtful, and well-reasoned commentary that Prof. Perlmutter has provides on the issues he writes about.

Professor Marc Lynch is quoted in the current Newsweek.

The new shows have “ingrained the legitimacy of disagreement” in Arab society, notes Marc Lynch, a political scientist at Williams College. “Even 10 years ago, there was a real notion that it was wrong to disagree, and if you did, you were being untrue to your Arab identity. Now, because of these shows, you can be a good Arab and disagree.”

Anyone interested in Arab media needs to read Lynch’s blog every day.

History Professor Scott Wong’s latest book, Americans First:
Chinese Americans and the Second World War, is out from Harvard University Press.

World War II was a watershed event for many of America’s minorities, but its impact on Chinese Americans has been largely ignored. Utilizing extensive archival research as well as oral histories and letters from over one hundred informants, K. Scott Wong explores how Chinese Americans carved a newly respected and secure place for themselves in American society during the war years.

The book gets a nice mention here, but I haven’t been able to find any substantive reviews. I gave Wong a bit of a hard time during the Nigaleian furor of last fall, but any Williams faculty member writing on matters military is alright with me.

As noted before, Dean of the Faculty Tom Kohut is interested in bringing the work of Williams faculty to a wider audience. Wong’s book might be a nice place to start.

The best part of EphBlog is often the anonymous comments. In this thread, a reader claims that:

[A] number of faculty are leaving the college soon, at least according to rumors on Spring Street. They are: Mark Taylor, Goethals, Kassin, Kotchen, Love and Stamelman.

True? I have no idea. Rumors about Taylor have been a staple of the College for decades. He could easily get another position somewhere else, but would his wife Dinny be offered a position comparable to her current job as Chief Technology Officer at Williams? Maybe, maybe not. Dual career couples have made it much more difficult for universities to poach each other’s faculty, relative to 30 years ago.

Goethals, at 61 or so, is near retirement age for Williams in any event. Perhaps he is planning to, like Jim Burns, retire from Williams and then take a new position elsewhere. Goethals is also one of the highest paid people at Williams ($219,000 in 2003). It seems unlikely that any place would be paying him much more than that. So, if he does leave, it probably isn’t about the money.

Love and Kotchen have only been at Williams (economics) for two years, but both are doing fine on the publication front, so both could probably get economic appointments elsewhere. But junior professors generally stay for more than 2 years at their first job, so I’d wager that they will be here until 2007 at least. Have their spouses found good employment in Williamstown?

Rampant speculation and rumor-mongering is, as always, welcome in the comments.

A couple of weeks ago, the Williams Record had a great article entitled, “Campus Security’s good cop.” It was about Kristi Guetti, secretary of Security, and it described her upbeat manner, her wall of postcards from students, and “the cult of Kristi.” As proof of her ability to spread good cheer, she won the Campus Life Award for Staff Service last year.

Think about it. You’re stuck in the basement of Hopkins Hall, pestered by students who’ve lost their IDs and/or are looking for more favorable parking spaces, and you’re in a good mood?

Employees like this are just one more example of what makes Williams special. I thoroughly enjoyed my interactions with Security when I was there — not that I had a lot of dealings with Security, since I was, and am, after all, an upstanding citizen. (Of course, I did get nailed for the Sawyer Sign Caper, but that’s another story — assuming that the statute of limitations has run out.) It’s nice to see that Security continues its tradition of enjoying working with students.

Given the current Harvard brouhaha over President Summers, I for one am glad we have Morty Schapiro at Williams. President Summers, in his drive to change the status quo, certainly seems to have rubbed a whole bunch of people the wrong way.

OK, I’ll admit it. Having read the full text of Dr. Summers’ January conference remarks, I certainly feel like telling the Harvard faculty, “Get a life.” But whether you agree or disagree with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ no confidence vote, these skirmishes detract from the daily life of an educational institution. Ultimately, the administration and faculty spend more time posturing/arguing and less time researching/teaching, to the detriment of the students and the vitality of the community.

Unlike his predecessor, from my outside vantage point, Morty appears to have the general support of the Williams community. (My only interaction with Hank Payne was when I asked him a direct question about student life during a Williams Today Q&A and he promptly answered along the lines of, “I’m so glad you asked me about the weather in Wichita….” In short, he sure rubbed me the wrong way. First, by not answering my question and, second, by assuming that I wasn’t bright enough to notice that he hadn’t answered my question.)

In my view, Morty strikes the right balance between discussion and activity. He allows and encourages discussion, but then says, “OK, let’s do it.” Academic communities too often mistake inactivity for deep reflection. (Trust me, I know. My father was both a university professor and a Dean.) Morty seems to have brought a zing, a certain joie de vivre, to the college, and I like it.