Other coverage is here and here.

If you want to picture the scene, think a typical packed Fountain party on a misty night. Line the entire street with MPD cars. Both sides of the street were flanked with curious/bewildered students with digicams and camera phones, and right in front of the first MPD car in the middle of the road is basically a clusterf*** of maybe 50-100 people. It’s this cluster that’s doing most of the chanting/singing/clapping.

About five minutes later, the police formed a line and started moving forward with their dogs and firing their paintball guns. A canister of tear/pepper gas was fired into the air. At this point it was pure chaos–One person made a run for it and was promptly brought to the ground by five MPDs. Picture people screaming at the police, students physically restraining other students, and one of the arrested kids kicking a patrol car’s door so hard that it bent the frame from the inside and nearly knocked out the window. MPD began menacingly shining the laser guides of their tasers at people. Five students were apprehended for various reasons (I saw at least one running). Of these, two were tasered, and at least three were viciously attacked by the dogs. Many people suffered from the pepper gas because the wind blew it across the crowd, towards Church Street. There was a lot of coughing and people covering their noses and mouths with their shirts. At some point, maybe out of spite, someone went into a house and turned up the music even louder. Students began asking for badge numbers and for reasons for the police presence and why their friends had gotten arrested.

Think the life of a famous financial journalist like Bethany is all glamor? Consider the madness she has to deal with on a regular basis.

As will be explored in a subsequent piece, it would be fair to describe my relationship with Bethany McLean of Fortune as “strained”. However, it is not unusual for her to write or call me seeking comment, generally regarding allegations fed her by crony hedge funds which she dutifully regurgitates on command, and sometimes regarding other things, too. I make it a point to respond promptly. On rare occasion when I have contacted her, she has responded promptly as well.

Thus I was a bit surprised at the turn taken by the following correspondence:

Think that is just the rantings of some Internetty crackpot? Think again! That is Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock. Only read the whole thing if you have a lot of time on your hands . . .

I hope to get deeper into the issue of class sizes at Williams versus Yale. And, even better, I now have some data. Consider the distribution of class sizes from the Common Data Set from page 27 on these pdfs: Williams and Yale. Sure looks like Sam and Anna are right! Yale has 2.5 times as many students at Williams and 2.5 times as many classes with 19 or fewer students. Impressive! Given that reality, there is much less reason to recommend Williams over Yale then Williams over Harvard. Time for Williams to go lecture-less.

The last episode of the project is set to be recorded next week, as I have run into a scheduling issue with the guest, so don’t be saddened if there is no show immediately following this one.

1) The WASP patriarchy of Williams is so powerful that the oppressed fear even recording their complaints.

2) There are very few actual bias incidents at Williams.

3) There is abusive behavior, but victims are too lazy report it or too cynical to think that any good will come from their reports.

I choose door #2.

No one denies that there are actual incidents of racism at Williams. Indeed, I have gone out of my way to document and report them. Without my efforts, few would know that Professor Aida Laleian used the term “nigger” to attack Professor Layla Ali in an Art Department meeting. Without my reporting, the identity of the creepy boyfriend behind Mary Jane Hitler would have remained a mystery.

The issue is: How common are such events? Not common at all, hence the lack of participation in the Williams Speaks Up star chamber.

1) Kudos to the Economics Department for taking the time and trouble to arrange (doc) practice sessions last week for the presenters. This is a bother for all concerned but certainly improves the quality of the presentations.

2) In past years, the Department has provided copies of theses on-line. Why not this year? I still wish that the Department would post and archive the comments that professors make on theses. I doubt that this has happened yet, but perhaps some day. Note that skeptics used to mock my efforts to post theses on-line, yet now there is a web page at the library devoted to this effort. We play a long game here at EphBlog.

3) Economics students who want the results of their theses to be read by hundreds of people (as have the results from Jen Doloec ‘03 and Lindsay Taylor ‘05) should write about Williams. Even better (especially if you are interested in graduate school) would be to ask Morty to be your adviser. (Recommendations from famous economists like Morty mean a great deal in the graduate school application process.) Topics? How should we measure “intellectual vitality” and is the Williams admissions office able to identify it a prior? What factors predict dropping out from Williams? What factors prediction satisfaction with the Williams experience? (See some of Morty’s comments to College Council.) How can we predict which applicants accepted by Williams will choose to enroll? (I think that Institutional Data guru Chris Winters ‘95 is already working on this topic, but I am sure that he/Morty would be happy to collaborate with an undergraduate.)

4) Readers are free to give thanks and reminisce about their own thesis presentations in the comments.

[Theodore] Parker, too, had famously bad handwriting. William Lloyd Garrison, hard-line abolitionist and editor of the Liberator, once complained that an essay Parker submitted was so unreadable it would require a dozen assistants to interpret his clotted sentences for the printer “without any serious blunders.” Grodzins, nevertheless, found ways to decipher Parker’s private journals, even one stunning passage written in code. Grodzins sensed Parker was unhappily married, but he had little direct evidence. Parker’s wife, Lydia, often read through her husband’s journals when he was out of the house, so the preacher couldn’t bare his soul there. Parker sometimes wrote in Greek or Latin, however, languages Lydia didn’t know. One such passage, Grodzins divined from its uncharacteristic word spacings, was actually English written with Greek characters. Putting together crossed out words and the Greek alphabet spellings, Grodzins found that Parker had written: “My wife is a DEVIL. I. HAVE. NO. HOPE. in. LIFE.”

With luck, no one will look closely at my EphBlog posts . . .

Yet — wouldn’t you know it? — today is my lovely wife’s birthday! Happy Birthday Mrs. EphBlog!

1) Drew is probably too modest to mention his outstanding Record op-ed from three years ago. Read that first to get a sense of the issues involved in improving social life at Williams.

2) Now that the College is overrun with student-social-life bureaucrats, there is much less freedom for a student like Drew to grasp the reins of campus leadership. The cost of having an Office of Campus Life is not just, or even primarily, the money spent on salaries and expenses. The most important cost is the damper such an office inevitably places on student leadership. If we did not have an OCL, then some student in the class of 2008 would have had a similar experience to Drew’s, would have saw a need and tried to fill it, would have fought and struggled and (sometimes) failed and (often) succeeded. What is that student’s name? We will never know. Remember the tablecloth colors.

3) Note that these are my criticisms, not Drew’s. I would be curious to read what he and other campus leaders think about creation and performance of the Office of Campus Life.

Drew writes:

Your cluster housing post ends with “Show us the data.” I am writing to send you some.

First, I must stress that I have no idea what social life is like now at Williams or how the Williams Housing system is working. My last good contact graduated from Williams a year ago. Therefore, I have no basis to be critical of what is going on on campus now. Instead, I am writing you to share historical data on social events at Williams. If you post or paraphrase my words, please mention that I am not explicitly or implicitly criticizing the current system; I definitely recognize that it’s clearly a
different time now.

I. Background:
All Campus Entertainment (”ACE”) was founded on April 10, 2002 by all of the campus social planning leaders. ACE combined the social-planning functions and budgets of the six student groups that previously planned campus-wide social and entertainment events: Student Activities Council, Social Chairs (formerly known as the Housing Committee), Goodrich Committee, Log Committee, Frosh Council, and Swing Club. ACE was founded at the suggestion and prodding of the administration to overcome the numerous, perennial problems of a de-centralized social planning system.

Some day in the future, I can explain more about ACE’s creation and share the documents and records that were generated at that time. But, it is unrelated to the data that I want to share with you now.

II. Student Satisfaction:
In November 2003, ACE ran a campus-wide survey on social and entertainment events and received 570 responses. The attached results showed that 74% of students rated the social and entertainment events produced by ACE as “good” or “excellent.” We were thrilled with this number for two reasons: (a) because it was much higher than the satisfaction rate shown in a College Council survey conducted during the 2001-2002 academic year and (b) because ACE was still in a transition/new phase when our survey was run.

III. Records of Social and Entertainment Events at Williams:
After its creation and during the 2002-2003 and 2003-2004 academic years, ACE produced about 95% of all campus-wide social and entertainment events at Williams. Because of this, the list of events that ACE produced is reflective of campus social life during those years.

To help preserve the records of social events at Williams and perhaps serve as a comparison for future years, I am attaching:

(a) List of the 317 events ACE produced in 2002-2003 *
(b) List of the 337 events ACE produced in 2003-2004
(c) Analysis of the 2002-2003 and 2003-2004 events
(d) ACE’s 2002-2003 Annual Report (released in Sept. 2003)

* The 2002-2003 event list does not include the estimated attendance and event length information for each event because the complete file was lost was when my computer crashed in August 2004.

There are lots more data around, including volumes of financial reports, which I can share one day in the future once I translate the cryptic financial statements.

ACE was created at the urging of the administration for the student life system that existed in 2002. It served its purpose and we had two very successful years, 2002-2003 and 2003-2004. With the arrival of new administrators and their desire to shift to a de-centralized system, ACE has tried to adapt and I think that ACE President Ali Barrett ‘09 has done an excellent job trying to serve the needs of the current social life system.

Thanks to Drew for taking the time and trouble to gather all this information together. Future historians (and future students) will thank him.

And yes, Lisa, your ability to ask penetrating questions is still functioning admirably, as I and my wife have been chewing over your observation (not included in the podcast) that my JA’s were from Kansas City and Vancouver, and I married a woman from Kansas City and honeymooned in Vancouver. Thanks loads.

Massachusetts lawmakers have caught the attention of Williams College leadership with a proposal to study taxing any private college’s endowment funds that exceed $1 billion.

Williams College’s various endowment funds total about $1.8 billion. If the proposal to assess a 2.5 percent tax on any endowment above the $1 billion mark were to become law, it would cost the college roughly $20 million.

This will never become law because Harvard is powerful enough to stop it. And does the Massachusetts legislature even have the power to tax non-profits? I doubt it, but perhaps our lawyer readers can comment. And, even if it did become law, it would be easy to get around, at least for Williams, by splitting the endowment into separate parts. The whole exercise is a poor excuse for preening demagoguery.

North Adams Mayor John Barrett III described the concept as “absolutely crazy. I don’t know who comes up with these ideas, but they should be locked up and put in a padded cell someplace.”

He pointed to the millions of dollars Williams has contributed to the construction of Williamstown Elementary School, Mount Greylock Regional High School and Mass MoCA in North Adams.

“It’s totally absurd to even be thinking about that — there are other ways to raise revenue,” Barrett added. “You’d only be hurting the college and the community.”

Williams spokesman James Kolesar said the proposal would hurt the entire community.

“This would be really bad not only for Williams College students but for the people and economies in the nearby communities,” he said. “And who would donate to the endowments when it would eventually be taxed away?”

Kolesar added that virtually all the endowment money spent by the college is spent locally on payroll, supplies, repairs and maintenance, and in donations to local community efforts. He said the college also donates $500,000 annually to local causes.

In addition, Williams College donated $1.8 million last December to the Sol Lewitt Gallery endowment fund at Mass MoCA.

1) Barrett may be the quintessential Massachusetts political hack, but at least he is our political hack.

2) Williams contributes $500,000 annually? That’s a bigger number than I would have guessed. I thought that Morty mentioned a figure closer to $200,000 at the Roads Scholars event in March. I think that the difference lies in the treatment of large “capital” gifts. The annual gifts are around $200,000 but then there are the not-uncommon big gifts, like $1.8 million to Mass MoCA. Including those gets us to $500,000 annually.

3) Why do we even bother with an alumni fund? Instead of getting my classmates to write checks to Williams, why don’t I just get them to write checks to Mass MoCA or MGRHS or North Adams Regional Hospital? (See links for my rants.) Have I really been railing about this for five years? Yes!

4) If you are Morty or Jim Kolesar or any senior Williams administrator that lives in the local area, uses the local hospital and sends your children to the local school, then spending millions of dollars from the College’s endowment to make these institutions better seems like a great idea. Objectively! Of course, this is ridiculous. None of this spending makes students more likely to choose Williams. Almost none of it makes great faculty more likely come or to stay at Williams. And, if you really wanted to attract/retain great faculty, it is 100 times cheaper to just show them the money.

Hey Seniors,

Had you not planned on going to Hilton Head because you didn’t have the time to plan it, or couldn’t find enough people for a house? Have other plans for Hilton Head week fallen through and you now would like to go but don’t have a place? Are you already in a house but it somehow got overbooked and now you’re sleeping on the floor?

Well look no further! We had 3 people back out of our 8 person house this morning, and would really love to refill the spots. The cost is about $175 for the whole week, and the house is just steps from the beach, and close by to the rest of the class.

My understanding is that there is now a tradition of seniors going to Hilton Head between the end of finals and graduation week. True? How many go? When did this start? Whose idea was it? Help us capture the history of Williams traditions as they start rather than try to recapture that history 20 years from now.

Common Sense calls for an American educational revolution for the 21st century. The bachelor’s degree is obsolete and expensive. That degree started in the 14th century, before Gutenberg, when the pedagogical constraint was the shortage of books. Instead, the nation should focus federal, public funds on being sure that by twenty-one years old, everyone has the critical thinking and language and quantitative skills to pass the Advanced Placement Exams in English Language and Composition and in Statistics.

Wick and I disagree about most things, but there is little doubt that he is right about this. College is a cruel hoax for many of those convinced to attend, and tricked into large amounts of debt while doing so. The notion that even 50% of the population, much less “everyone,” should get a college degree is as ludicrous as the claim that “everyone” should get a masters. Why not require that everyone get a Ph.D.? Educational romanticism does much harm, the good intentions of those who prattle such nonsense notwithstanding.

So, every dollar that the federal government devotes to subsidizing the college should be devoted to high school. Given the power of the college industrial complex, the odds of this happening are close to zero. But I hope that Wick keeps up the fight!

The Fifth is Connecticut’s least Democratic district (D+3.7). Republican Nancy Johnson represented the area for 24 years until 2006, when she was defeated by Democrat Chris Murphy.

Murphy, 34, has had a remarkable record of political success, particularly for such a young guy. Fresh out of college at 22, he managed the campaign of Democrat Charlotte Koskoff, who ran against Johnson in 1996 and came within one point of unseating her. After graduating from law school, Murphy then defeated a 14-year incumbent to win a seat in the State House, then captured a Republican-held seat in the State Senate before defeating Johnson quite badly in 2006, winning by 12 points after a series of nasty attacks by the Johnson campaign. Since his election, Murphy has proven to be a popular Congressman and an excellent fundraiser, currently sitting on a $1.5 million war chest.

The Republicans hope to take this seat back with State Senator David Cappiello, who has been forced to run away from his unpopular president in this Dem-leaning district. Needless to say, that hasn’t gone over especially well with his based [sic] (though he and Bush appear to be getting on fine, as Bush held a fundraiser for Cappiello at Henry Kissinger’s house a few weeks ago).

It appears that the line of attack will be to paint Murphy as a DC insider who is soft on terrorism-indeed, it appears that that is already what they’re doing. As DemFromCT notes, however, it’s unlikely to work:

This is a winning strategery for McCain and Republicans… why? It’s not 2002 any more. The inept Republican fear campaign played badly for Nancy Johnson in 2006 and Rudy Giuliani in 2008. Why would it work better now?

Alas, it’s going to take a Democratic win in November to purge the system of the idea that Republican fear and smear still work. Chalk that up to yet another reason to vote Democratic.

Hear, hear.

The Republicans are dreaming big about CT-05, but I don’t think this is the year they’re going to stop Chris Murphy’s meteoric rise.

Race tracker wiki: CT-02 CT-04 CT-05

I hope that they are writing articles like this about me in 50 years.

Here are some vital statistics on Phil Cole. He stands 5-foot-6-inches, weighs about 150 pounds, and has been canoeing for 35 years. He can paddle at a pace of 60 strokes per minute, and he competes in races as long as 70 miles.

Here’s one more number for you: Cole will be 90 in November.

Cole, as he’ll be the first to tell you, is old. But he can still be found most afternoons gliding down the Contoocook River in Hopkinton, a stretch of water he’s basically owned for the past 3½ decades. And though he’s long since advanced beyond the highest age brackets, Cole competes in canoe races throughout the country. His next big race is a 70-miler in Cooperstown, N.Y., a course Cole expects to finish in about 11 hours.

“I’m the oldest one out there, period. Have been for a while,” Cole said.

His nine decades notwithstanding, Cole is sturdy and fit, with broad shoulders and a barrel chest. He wears old sweaters, baseball caps, and sneakers. You won’t hear him praising the therapeutic benefits of canoeing or waxing poetic about the natural beauty of the rivers he’s spent so many hours paddling. He’s a canoer because he likes it and he’s good at it. And though he’s cocky, Cole knows his limits.

“Right now, I’m in the position that if you’re 75 or older, I can beat you,” Cole said.

Cole grew up on a dairy farm in Williamstown, Mass., and studied physics at Williams College, just three miles from his family’s house. When World War II began, he tried to join the military, but a knee injury kept him out. He managed to get a job as a physicist with the Navy - a job he kept for the next 31 years. When he retired in 1974, Cole and his wife moved to Contoocook, to be close to his daughter Nancy, who was a teacher in Concord.

The Alumni Directory is down so I don’t know what Cole’s class year is. Does anyone?

1) Laura is silly to worry about any baleful effect that such articles might have on the future girls sports in America. Just look at the trajectory over the last 20 years and extend that into the future. More girls will be playing more sports for more hours with better coaching and more expensive facilities for years to come. Note how the Eph women’s soccer team webpage lists, not only the their hometowns but their club teams.

2) The Marxist reading focuses on the economic incentives. Most of the substantive points come for people who make a living selling their injury-prevention services to families and teams. Of course they want to hype injuries as a major issue for girls sports. If there were no problem, they would be out of a job.

3) The girls-sports-industrial-complex is the primary cause of the huge increase in the skill level of Eph womens sports in the last two decade. Although the mens teams of today also play better (?), the womens teams are just shockingly good in comparison to those of the 1980’s.

If you want to get charged for after-party damages, get disgusted with vomit in bathrooms, and being left with no place to take shower or at least brush your teeth, then Spencer house is probably the right place for you to live. My email inbox is full of emails about damage charges in the house. Before going to bed, my stomach gets uncomfortable after facing the “shit” vomit in bathroom on weekend nights, and I lose my appetite for at least to meals sessions. Last night after leaving Schow library, I went to the bathroom on third floor of Spencer house where i faced the vomit in all over the bathroom- no spot for stepping in actually - yeq

Oh wait! That post was from yesterday, not three years ago.

Of course, for supporters of Neighborhoods, this post is inconceivable. It was only in the bad old days of free agency, when students lived where they wanted, and with whom they chose, that houses like Spencer lacked community. Didn’t Professor Will Dudley tell us (pdf) in 2005 that free agency was one of the causes of anti-social behavior, that free agency

gives them [students] a smaller stake in their local communities (which have become dormitory buildings filled with individuals and small groups, rather than houses filled with members), and a weaker incentive to get to know their neighbors (who are redistributed across campus every 9 months, rather than affiliated with each other for 3 years). Indeed, students frequently complain that they barely know the residents of their dorms outside of their own suites.

Yes, he did! Now that students have a stake, we should see less vomit in Spencer. Do we? I doubt it.

And this is the fundamental dishonesty of the process by which the Williams community has tried (and failed) to improve undergraduate social life. As I pointed out three years ago, the College has access to a great deal of high-quality data about student experiences. Why does the Administration continue to refuse to share that data with the wider community? If Neighborhood Housing, along with the many CUL-inspired policy changes which proceeded it, has truly made things better, then the data should demonstrate that fact. I bet that the data would show the opposite, that students at Williams were less happy with social life in 2007-2008 then they were a decade prior, before Morty, before the relentless attack on free agency began.

Show us the data.