Williams College

Williams College is a private, coeducational, highly selective (17% admission rate in 2006) liberal arts college located in Williamstown, Massachusetts. As of 2005, the school has an enrollment of 1945 undergraduate students and 59 graduate students.

Williams was established in 1793 with funds from the estate of Ephraim Williams as a men's college, located in the Berkshires in northwestern Massachusetts, at the foot of Mount Greylock. It is 145 miles (233 km) from Boston and 165 miles (266 km) from New York City. When Henry David Thoreau visited in 1844, he remarked that "It would be no small advantage if every college were thus located at the base of a mountain." In 1834, the first non-secret fraternity in the United States, Delta Upsilon, was founded on its campus. Fraternities were phased out beginning in 1962. The college became coeducational in 1970.

There are three academic curricular divisions (humanities, sciences, and social sciences), 24 departments, 33 majors, and two small master's-degree programs in art history and development economics. There are 286 voting faculty members, with a student-to-faculty ratio of 7:1. The college also sponsors academic programs at Mystic Seaport; Exeter College, Oxford of Oxford University, the Williams-Exeter Programme; and most recently in New York City, the Williams@NY program. A program announced in 2006, Williams in Africa (WIA), will enable Juniors to spend anywhere from several weeks to a year studying in Africa and doing humanitarian work. Several students have already spent time working in South Africa in a pilot study of the program.

The academic year follows a 4-1-4 schedule of two four-course semesters plus a one-course "winter study" term in January. An intensive summer research schedule involves about 200 students on campus doing projects with professors; already widespread in the science departments, the summer research projects are being extended more substantially into other departments.

History

Colonel Ephraim Williams was an officer in the Massachusetts militia and a member of a prominent landowning family. His will included a bequest to support and maintain a free school to be established in the town of West Hoosac, Massachusetts, provided that the town change its name to Williamstown. The will was unsigned and undated, and provided additional stipulations, such as the town remaining in Massachusetts rather than becoming part of New York, as some residents wanted. Williams was killed at the Battle of Lake George on September 8, 1755.

The creation of Williams College was opposed by the alumni of Harvard College, who argued that "there was no need of another college; that it would injure Harvard, to whose support the colony had been pledged for nearly one hundred and thirty years; that it was desirable to maintain a high standard of learning; and that this would be impossible were another institution be able to confer degrees, because, were the means then devoted to one divided between two, the standard of both would be lowered, and jealousies and dissention prejudicial to the peace and education of the colony would be fomented." ^*

After Shays Rebellion, the Williamstown Free School opened with 15 students on October 26, 1791. Not long afterward, the trustees of the school petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to convert the free school to a tuition-based college. The legislature agreed and on June 22, 1793, Williams College was chartered.

In 1806, a student prayer meeting gave rise to the American Foreign Mission Movement. In August of that year, five students met in the maple grove of Sloan's Meadow to pray. A thunderstorm drove them to the shelter of a haystack, and the fervor of the ensuing meeting inspired them to take the Gospel abroad. The students went on to build the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the first American organization to send missionaries overseas. The Haystack Monument near Mission Park on the Williams Campus commemorates the meeting.

By 1815, Williams had only two buildings and 58 students, and was in serious financial trouble. On November 10, 1818, nine of the twelve Williams College trustees voted for a resolution stating that:

"Resolved, that it is expedient to remove Williams College to some more central part of the State whenever sufficient funds can be obtained to defray the necessary expenses incurred and the losses sustained by removal, and to secure the prosperity of the college, and when a fair prospect shall be presented of obtaining for the institution the united support and patronage of the friends of literature and religion in the western part of the Commonwealth, and when the General Court shall give their assent to the measure."

In February 1820, a petition to the Massachusetts legislature to this effect was defeated, and the college was not moved. In 1821, the president of the college, Zephaniah Swift Moore, who had accepted his position believing that the college would move east, abandoned Williams. He took 15 students with him, and became the first president of Amherst College. According to legend, Moore also took portions of the Williams College library. Though plausible, this account is unsubstantiated, and was declared false in 1995 by Williams College President Harry C. Payne. Moore died just two years later after founding Amherst, and was succeeded by Heman Humphrey, a trustee of Williams College.

Williams played Amherst in the first intercollegiate baseball game in 1859 and continued on to pioneer many areas of academia and education.

Williams was the first American college or university to feature caps and gowns at commencement ceremonies.

Presidents

Ebenezer Fitch, 1793-1815
Zephaniah Swift Moore, 1815-1821
Edward Dorr Griffin, 1821-1836
Mark Hopkins, 1836-1872
Paul Ansel Chadbourne, 1872-1881
Franklin Carter, 1881-1901
John Haskell Hewitt, 1901-1902
Henry Hopkins, 1902-1908
Harry Augustus Garfield, 1908-1934
Tyler Dennett, 1934-1937
James Phinney Baxter, 1937-1961
John Edward Sawyer, 1961-1973
John Wesley Chandler, 1973-1985
Francis Christopher Oakley, 1985-1993
Harry C. Payne, 1994-1999
Carl W. Vogt, 1999-2000
Morton Owen Schapiro, 2000-present

Commencement Speakers

Distinguishing features

School colors and origins thereof

Williams's primary school color is purple.

The story goes that at the Williams-Harvard baseball game in 1869, spectators, watching from carriages, had trouble telling the teams apart (there were no uniforms) so one of the onlookers bought ribbons from a nearby millinery store to pin on Williams' players. The only color available was purple. The buyer was Jennie Jerome (later Winston Churchill's mother) whose family summered in Williamstown.

Williams's other color is gold, purple's complementary color, which is why most team uniforms and paraphernalia have purple and a form of gold or yellow as the two dominant colors.

Williams's rugby teams, however, wear the colors claret (a dark red) and gold.

Purple Cow

The Williams college mascot, formally established by a vote of the student body in 1907, is a purple cow. This peculiar mascot has several possible sources:

- Gelett Burgess's nonsense poem (the original is in the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA):

I never saw a purple cow
I never hope to see one;
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I'd rather see than be one!

- Another possible source of the mascot is the color of the surrounding mountains, which often appear purple in the light of the setting sun (but which don't really resemble cows).

- A humor magazine in the early 20th Century was named "The Purple Cow."

According to a caption on a photograph at the Williamstown House of Local History, the purple cow may have come from a student prank: a farmer always left his cow staked near Weston Field, and several students painted the cow purple.

Alma mater

Williams claims the first alma mater song written by an undergraduate, "The Mountains", which was written by Washington Gladden of the class of 1859.

Student media

There are several Williams publications produced by students each year. The longest running student newspaper is the Williams Record, a weekly broadsheet paper produced every Wednesday. Several other newspapers have been founded over the years, but none has survived as long as the Record.

The student yearbook is called the Gulielmensian (named after the Latin word for Williams). It has been irregularly published in the past decade, but dates back to the mid 19th century.

Numerous smaller campus publications of a literary nature are also produced each year, including a campus humor magazine and collections of poetry.

WCFM Williamstown 91.9 broadcasts from new offices in Prospect Hall at 1.1 kilowatts, reaching most of the Berkshire area. As the campus radio station, it is commercial- and format-free, leaving DJs to lead their own program as they wish. It also occasionally broadcasts Williams sporting events and hosts campus concerts. An online feed and website (wcfm.williams.edu) makes WCFM available to listeners worldwide.

Williams Trivia

At the end of every semester since 1966, the Williams College radio station has hosted an all-night, eight-hour trivia contest. Teams of students, alumni, professors, friends and others compete to answer questions on any number of subjects, identify songs, and perform a variety of unnecessary tasks. The winning team's only prize is the obligation to create and host the following semester's contest.

The precise date of the debut contest is uncertain. Most spring contests occur in early May, but during its first decade, Williams Trivia was sometimes held in March or February. Assuming a May date, Lawrence University's Great Midwest Trivia Contest, first held on April 29, 1966, would be the oldest continuous competition of its sort in the United States. But if the first Williams contest was held earlier, it would be the oldest. The distinction is appropriately trivial.

While other college-based trivia contests in the United States tend to emphasize marathon endurance and revel in the obscurity of their material, the aim of the Williams contest is to cram as much entertaining material into a concentrated space as possible. Over the years the Williams Trivia contest has generally adhered to the credo of its founder, Frank Ferry: "We don't deal in minutia, which may be defined as useless facts with no emotional value. Trivia concerns something you know but can't quite remember."

Despite lasting just eight hours (compared with the weekend-long contests on other campuses), a typical Williams Trivia contest will demand between 900 and 1,200 separate "bits" of trivial information in eight hours, delivering twice as much content as its "competitors" in a fraction of the time. Williams Trivia is also conducted twice a year, so the amount of fresh material needed to sustain the contest from generation to generation is great. However, it should be noted that no discernable rivalry exists between any of the various contests.

As the above math indicates, a distinctive element of William Trivia is the complexity of play. Typically, at any given point in the proceedings, a team will be simultaneously answering a question, identifying a song, answering two concurrent bonuses on specific topics (these can be textual, visual, or audio), preparing or performing an in-studio "Action Trivia" performance, and considering clues from an eight-hour-long thematic bonus, with a staggered series of deadlines. It is for this reason that large teams have a substantial advantage, and experienced teams even more so. To date, only three freshman teams have won the contest. The smallest team to win was only 8 players, but this occurred in 1980; because the contest's manifold nature has since increased, such a feat is exceedingly unlikely today. A one-person team once managed to reach 5th place. In 2005, the first entirely off-campus team managed to win the contest while playing remotely. Still, many teams do not seek the championship trophy. One such team, "The Manhattan Skyliners," has played from 1972 to the present without ever having won.

The contest has occasionally received outside media coverage, including in the Sunday New York Times. Further history and details are available at an archival website.

The Old Hopkins Observatory

Williams College is the site of the Hopkins Observatory, the oldest extant astronomical observatory in the United States. Erected in 1836-1838, it now contains the Mehlin Museum of Astronomy, including Alvan Clark's first telescope (from 1852) and the Milham Planetarium, which uses a Zeiss Skymaster ZKP3/B optomechanical projector and an Ansible digital projector, both installed in 2005. The Hopkins Observatory's 0.6-m DFM reflecting telescope (1991) is installed elsewhere on the campus. Williams joins with Wellesley, Wesleyan, Middlebury, Colgate, Vassar, Swarthmore, and Haverford/Bryn Mawr to form the Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium, sponsored for over a decade by the Keck Foundation and now with its student research programs sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

Williams College Museum of Art

The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA), with over 12,000 works (only a fraction of which are displayed at any one time) in its permanent collection, serves as an educational resource for both undergraduates and students in the graduate art history program.

The collection is quite eclectic, featuring both Eastern and Western art, from the ancient world to the contemporary scene. Many different media are represented, including painting, sculpture, photography, and video.

Notable works include "Morning in a City" by Edward Hopper, a commissioned wall painting by Sol LeWitt, and a commissioned outdoor sculpture and landscape work by Louise Bourgeois titled "Eyes".

The museum also contains the largest collection of works by brothers Charles Prendergast and Maurice Prendergast. The collection was donated by Eugénie Van Kimmel Prendergast, Charles's widow, and includes documents and other archival materials, in addition to over 400 works of art by the two brothers.

During the 1980's, the museum gained heightened prominence under the leadership of then-director Thomas Krens. Krens is a leading figure in the museum world as director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Krens was the visionary who first formulated the idea of establishing the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMoCa).

Though often overshadowed by the neighboring and much larger Clark Art Institute and MassMoCa, WCMA remains one of the premier attractions of The Berkshires. Because the museum is intended primarily for educational purposes, admission is free for all.

Chapin Library

The Chapin Library is a collection that supports the liberal arts curriculum of the college by allowing students close access to a number of rare books and documents of interest. It is unusual for one of the nation's major rare book collections to be in an undergraduate institution.

The library opened on June 18, 1923, with an initial collection of 9,000 volumes contributed by alumnus Alfred Clark Chapin, Class of 1869. Over the years, Chapin Library has grown to include over 50,000 volumes (including 3,000 more given by Chapin) as well as 100,000 other artifacts such as prints, photographs, maps, and bookplates.

The most famous items in the library's collection include the founding documents of the United States of America. These include first printings of the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, United States Constitution, and Bill of Rights, as well as George Washington's personal copy of the Federalist Papers. Other notable objects include a range of books, letters, and miscellaneous items relating to Theodore Roosevelt, who was a friend and, at one point, colleague of Chapin in the New York State Assembly.

The Chapin Library's science collection includes a first edition of Nicolaus Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, as well as first editions of books by Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Galileo, Isaac Newton, and other major figures.

Alumni society

The Society of Alumni of Williams College is the oldest existing alumni society of any academic institution in the United States, and may be the oldest alumni organization in the world. The Society of Alumni was founded during the "Amherst crisis" in 1821, when Williams College President Zephaniah Swift Moore left Williams. Graduates of Williams formed the Society to ensure that Williams would not have to close, and raised enough money to ensure the future survival of the school.

In the years since the Amherst Crisis the generosity of alumni has made Williams one of the wealthiest educational institutions in the United States, with an endowment of over $1 billion.

Not affiliated with the Society of Alumni, but also serving the college's alumni is the Williams Club in New York City. Located at 24 East 39th Street in Manhattan, the club is open to the paying public as a hotel and restaurant, and operates as a meeting space for Williams alumni living in and visiting the city. It is also the headquarters for the Williams@NY program, accommodating Williams college students and the director of the program, Professor Robert Jackall.

Notable alumni

In the syndicated cartoon strip FoxTrot, the father Roger Fox, is an alumnus of Willot College, a parody of Williams College. The creator, Bill Amend is an Amherst grad.

Sports

The school's sports teams are called the Ephmen, or the Ephs (pronounced "Eef", or ^* in IPA) - a shortening of the first name of founder Ephraim Williams. They participate in the NCAA's Division III and the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC), which also includes Amherst, Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Connecticut College, Hamilton, Middlebury, Trinity, Tufts, and Wesleyan.

Williams has had tremendous success winning the NACDA Director's Cup, an annual award formerly known as the Sears Cup which is presented to the institution within each NCAA division that has the greatest overall success in NCAA sanctioned championships. Williams has won the Director's Cup nine of the ten years since its inception, including seven years in a row through 2005. The only other college to win the Sears Cup since the competition's inception was the University of California San Diego ("UCSD") Tritons, which became a NCAA Division II institution shortly thereafter.

In 2004,2005, and 2006, the college achieved #1 rankings in both academics and athletics within its peer groups (liberal arts colleges as ranked by U.S. News and World Report and NCAA Division III institutions as ranked by the Director's Cup calculations, respectively). Dual #1 rankings in any single year was an unprecedented achievement among the 1,053 NCAA member institutions.

Williams has a traditional rivalry with Amherst College's Lord Jeffs, as well as Wesleyan University. The "Little Three", a subset of NESCAC, comprises the three schools. Williams and Amherst currently compete in 26 varsity sports and Williams sports a winning record vs. Amherst in 21. Amherst leads in baseball, men's soccer and basketball, women's lacrosse, and the two schools' women's soccer teams were tied, as of 11/6/2003.

The Williams Women's Swimming & Diving team won the school's first national title in 1981, and claimed the title in 1982 as well. Williams played in the 2003 and 2004 men's basketball Division III national championship games, winning the title in March 2003. Other Williams teams to capture national titles since Williams began participating in NCAA tournaments in 1994 include men's tennis, women's tennis, men's cross country, women's cross country, women's crew, and men's soccer. Other perennial contenders include women's field hockey, women's lacrosse, men's golf, men's and women's swimming and diving and men's and women's track and field.

Club Sports

Williams also has an extremely active club and intramural sports scene with teams in baseball, ultimate, lacrosse, rugby and water polo.

Rankings

Williams currently holds first place in U.S. News and World Report's most recent ranking of the top liberal arts colleges in America. It has tied for first in the "academic reputation" category each year that U.S. News has produced a survey, sharing that honor with rival Amherst College. Williams ranked fifth, after Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford, in a 2004 Wall Street Journal survey of the "feeder schools" to the top five business, law, and medical schools in the country. Williams has also produced the most Rhodes Scholars of any liberal arts college in the country, with 37.

Recent events

In 2003 Williams began the first of three massive construction projects. The $60 million dollar '62 Center for Theatre and Dance was the first project to be successfully completed in the spring of 2005. The other two projects, the $44 million dollar Student Center and $123 million dollar Stetson-Sawyer project, have experienced several financial setbacks, but are continuing nonetheless with strong support from the Administration and the recent unanimous recommitment of the Board of Trustees. The new Student Center, to be named The Paresky Center for its principal donors, David '60 and Linda Paresky, is under construction and is scheduled to be completed in early 2007.

The Stetson Sawyer renovation however, is still in the design phase. The entire project calls for two new academic buildings, the removal of the Sawyer Library from its current location, and the construction of a new Library at the rear of a renovated Stetson Hall. College trustees balked at the cost of the Stetson-Sawyer project and were calling for upwards of $17 million dollars to be cut from the library component of the project. Some students have expressed their dissatisfaction with the College over the delays of the Stetson-Sawyer project, questioning whether college values academics above all else. Sawyer and Stetson are badly in need of improvements having suffered from botched renovations from years prior. The $38 million dollar Schow Science Library erected in 2001 is popular among students for studying but has poor acoustics due to a four story ceiling, and lacks private study space.

The Williams House System

After several years of planning, with little student participation or input, the College has recently decided to group undergraduates into four geographically coherent clusters, or "Houses", philosophically related to those at several Ivy League universities. First-years (formerly known as Freshmen) will be housed in Sage Hall, Williams Hall and Mission Park, while upperclassmen will utilize current First-year dormitories East College, Lehman Hall, Fayerweather, and Morgan, as well as the current upperclass dormitories to form the four houses. A student vote on the names of the four 'clusters' selected 'Currier', 'Wood', 'Spencer' and 'Dodd' by a simple majority. These were the temporary working names assigned prior to voting. Starting with the class of 2010, incoming freshmen will be randomly assigned to clusters as an entry (An entry is a group of freshmen who live together with a male and female junior advisor). Rising sophomores will have the option to be randomly assigned to a different cluster than the rest of their entry in groups of six or fewer. This new system is an attempt to integrate all undergraduates more successfully than is now possible, mixing students representing a variety of interests and ethnicities, and supporting each House with its own dining and recreational facilities. Moreover, the new housing system will attempt to abolish the stigmas associated with certain dormitories. The new housing system is an evolution of the major housing changes that occurred at Williams College in 2002. Prior to 2002, upperclassmen had the opportunity to enter the housing draw with up to 7 other classmates if desired. This effectively allowed for students to live with their friends or those who had similar interests, study habits and sleeping patterns. Furthermore, each spring, housing draw results were posted to the internet and updated in real-time so that students could monitor where their friends were choosing to live for the next school year. In the winter of 2002, the housing committee along with the unwavering support of Dean Roseman, voted to reduce the maximum allowable size of group housing picks from 8 down to 4. In addition, live housing draw results were eliminated to further prevent students from forming large living blocks. While these two changes were overwhelmingly opposed by the student body (per a massive student-signed petition) and the representative student council, Dean Roseman and other college officials refused to bow to student opinion. Both senior college officials and the housing committee felt that there was a far greater need to force a more balanced housing environment where students from different ethnic backgrounds or those with dissimilar interests could have the chance to live together in the same entry or house.

Capital campaign

Williams is currently engaged in the largest capital campaign ever undertaken by a liberal arts college, with a goal of raising $400 million by 2007. The college has raised approximately $300 million towards this goal as of the end of 2005. Williams already has one of the largest endowments of any liberal arts college, valued at $1.35 billion at the end of FY2005 and close behind Grinnell College's (Iowa) endowment of $1.40 billion.

External links

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