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Coming Out @ Williams – the context
Further my post of a few days ago, Coming Out @ Williams in 1972, here is more detail on Mr. Pinello, the author of the piece, and the background of the article and its aftermath. As you can read here, he spent the summer before the article in New York:
Walk by the door. Hesitate. Turn around and look as though by chance something on this desolate block has caught your eye, although there’s not a soul on the street to see you. Read the tiny sign pasted on the door, “Gay Activists’ Alliance, 99 Wooster Street,” act like the inquisitive tourist always willing to see a new show, boldly uncatch the lock, and walk in.
After that summer in New York, he became convinced of the need to focus some attention on homosexuality at Williams. He was also “tired of celibacy” and wanted “an identifiable gay community in which to socialize.” The pitch to the Advocate was controversial:
Then the fit hit the shan, as Charlie Rubin says. The evening had droned on, but ears pricked up at mention of a heretofore unmentionable subject at Williams. Immediately John Enteman vowed the advertisers would revolt: Cary Walsh would have nothing to do with queers or even the mention of them. Such an article would end the House of Walsh [a Spring Street clothing store] patronage for which, John claimed, he had worked so hard. Tempted to say to hell with Cary, I only replied that a paper’s first responsibility is to its readers and not to its advertisers. Well, John announced, don’t plan on any funds from advertising then.
However, the project was picked up. Even after that, it became difficult to get any good information – the senior staff at Williams was in some ways unaware and in other ways unwilling to be quoted on the subject.
When our interviews with Messrs. Booth, Crider, Frost, Gates, Hyde, Rudolph, Talbot, and Van Ouwerkerk proved almost bootless, I decided that an attempt to dredge up any campus gay history was futile and that I knew more about the homosexual’s plight at Williams than anyone else. Since I then knew who the expert was, I sat down one afternoon and interviewed him. And that, along with minor revisions and additions Mitch recommended, became the Advocate’s homosexual lead article.
As you may recall, Dan’s number was attached to the end of that article. He did receive calls, almost immediately. Some were pranks; others were supportive, but no one responded in the way Pinello has hoped for. A few weeks later, he put together a panel of gay activists from New York, with a large attendance of over a hundred. At the end of the panel, all interested in forming a group on the subject were invited to Griffin that night – twelve came. Pinello wrote about the experience in his senior honor thesis, which I will quote once more:
My personal liberation has been great. Just over a year ago, I had difficulty saying the word homosexual. That was something never mentioned in my experience: the word was almost foreign – too specific yet nearly meaningless. Hazy, nefarious connotations sprang up at its sound. My own prejudices thus were one of the biggest obstacles I had to overcome. GAA exposed me to the gay world’s diversity. My coming out at Williams forced me to defend my actions, to scrutinize all my past assumptions about human phenomena. When confronted, say, with Biblical quotations, I had to know the answers. When eyed in the Snack Bar or on the street, I had to evaluate my commitment. When heckled on the phone, I had to find the spunk to face the oppressor and fight back.
The group might not have had the success Dan hoped for, but it succeeded in gaining backing from College Council for adding “sexual orientation” to the college’s non-discrimination statement. That resolution was defeated by the faculty with resistance from senior staff as well, though another resolution pledging non-discrimination was adapted. The following day, a lecturer in Art came out to his students and wrote to the New York Times as a representative of the group, which had yet to meet openly. Nowadays, sexual orientation is discussed openly on campus, but it’s worth remembering how far this campus has come.
I wrote Dan, and he sent this in return:
Every decade or so, my coming out article is rediscovered at Williams. The Williams Record republished it sometime in the 1990s.
By the way, your readers may be interested to know that I’ll be in
Williamstown on the weekend of May 1, 2, and 3. The College’s LGBT alumni
group is planning a panel of speakers then about same-sex marriage, and I’ve
been invited to participate.
I hope to publish more from Perspectives in the future, but am trying to avoid the need to transcribe whole pages – watch Ephblog for updates to this series.
Good People of Williams
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!
Danger, Danger, Danger!! Williams class makes top 10 “Most Dangerous College Courses”.
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?
James Carville Disses Williams
What’s up with this random diss (I think?) of Williams students from James Carville? Good thing I’m already an Obama supporter:
James Carville, Mr. Clinton’s political strategist in 1992, said that the jousting between the two camps had hardly turned toxic, and that the stakes of this election were too high to have a milquetoast campaign.
“This is not Williams College students electing a commencement speaker. This is a huge deal,” Mr. Carville said. “Does the president risk going overboard? Sure. But Obama runs a risk of being wussified.”
Real Constructive Criticism at Williams
. . . 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.
Homecoming and the WSO Rideboard
At the end of the week, after work on Friday, I’ll be hitting the road to make the five-hour trip from my home on the Main Line of Philadelphia to Williamstown for Homecoming. Anyone who needs a ride at this time from this area is welcome to contact me and see if something can be arranged, as long as you can share the car with . . .
Quote ID, #2
Which Williams graduate said the following? What was his/her name, class, and where did he/she say this?
We hear much said about self-educated men, and a broad distinction is made between them and others; but the truth is that every man who is educated at all, is, and must be, self-educated.
Hint: He was a member of the Class of ‘24.
Currently browsing posts filed under "Quotes"
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