Williams College

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Williams College
Motto	E liberalitate E. Williams, armigeri The Latin translates to English as "Through the Generosity of E. Williams, Esquire (Arms-bearer / Soldier)."
Established	1793
Type	Private
President	Morton Owen Schapiro
Staff	286
Undergraduates	1,970
Postgraduates	59
Location	Williamstown, MA, USA
Campus	Rural
Athletics	Ephs
Mascot	Purple cow
Website	www.williams.edu

Williams College is a private, coeducational, highly selective (18% admission rate in 2006) liberal arts college located in Williamstown, Massachusetts. According to the US News ranking, it is the best liberal arts college in the United States. 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. [1] 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 the Williams-Mystic program at Mystic Seaport; the Williams-Exeter Programme at Exeter College of Oxford University; and Williams in New York (also known as WINY or Williams@NY). 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.

Contents 1 History 2 Distinguishing features 2.1 School colors and mascot 2.2 Alma mater 2.3 Student media 2.4 Williams Trivia 2.5 The Old Hopkins Observatory 2.6 Chapin Library 2.7 Williams College Museum of Art 3 Alumni society 4 Sports 4.1 Club sports 5 Rankings 6 Recent events 6.1 The Williams House System 6.2 Capital campaign 7 In fiction 8 References 9 See also 10 External links 11 References

[edit] 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 dissension prejudicial to the peace and education of the colony would be fomented." [2]

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, the transfer of books 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, in order to eliminate the differences in apparel between rich and poor students.

[edit] Distinguishing features

[edit] School colors and mascot

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, and its ultimate frisbee team has in recent years begun to wear primarily yellow jerseys.

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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Student media

The Williams Record

The longest running independent newspaper at Williams is the Williams Record, a weekly broadsheet paper published on Wednesdays. The newspaper was founded in 1885 and has outlasted several other competitors, which have come and gone over the years. The Record has a weekly circulation of 3,000 broadsheet copies distributed in Williamstown, in addition to more than 600 subscribers across the country.

The newspaper does not receive financial support from the college or from the student government, allowing it considerable leeway in criticizing both on its editorial pages. To maintain its independent status, the Record relies on revenue generated by local and national ads sales, subscriptions, and voluntary contributions for use of its web site. En lieu of paying rent for its office space in the Paresky Center, the newspaper provides the college community with free stacks of each issue in public spaces on campus and around Williamstown.

Unlike many professional newspapers, the editor-in-chief of the Record exercises complete control over news and editorial content, as well as over the business aspects of the paper. He or she is selected from the editorial board each calendar year by the preceding editor-in-chief. The 2007 editor-in-chief is Erin Brown ´08.

Both Sawyer Library and the College Archives maintain more than a century's worth of publically accessible, bound volumes of the Record. The newspaper provides access free of charge to a searchable database of articles stretching back to 1998 on its web site.

The Gulielmensian

The student yearbook is called the Gulielmensian (named after the Latin word for Williams). It was published irregularly in the 1990s, but has been annual for the past several years and dates back to the mid 19th century.

91.9 WCFM Williamstown

91.9 WCFM Williamstown is a college-owned, student-run, non-commercial radio station broadcasting from the basement of Prospect House at 91.9 mHz. Its 1.1 kW transmitter gives it the potential to reach all of Williamstown and North Adams clearly. Featuring 85 hours per week of original programming, the station features a wide variety of musical genres, in addition to sports and talk radio. The studios are home to over 25,000 vinyl records plus thousands more CDs. The station is also available through a wide variety of streaming outlets, such as iTunes and Winamp. Because the station is free-form, the DJs choose what kind of music they want to play. Members of the surrounding communities above the age of 18 are allowed to DJ on the station, which, as part of its mission, seeks to serve the surrounding community with news and announcements of public interest. On Saturday afternoons, the station broadcasts Williams football games and other sporting events. The board of the radio station holds a concert every semester in addition to other small events such as annual Blastoff which commemorates WCFM's return to the airwaves in the fall.

Williams Students Online

Williams Students Online provides Internet publishing and communications tools to the rest of the college community. It includes a page titled Willipedia which uses the Wikipedia format and focuses on student groups, buildings, people, and events which relate to the college.

Other publications

Numerous smaller campus publications are also produced each year, including The Mad Cow, a humor magazine, and the Literary Review, a literary magazine.

[edit] Williams Trivia

At the end of virtually every semester since 1966, the Williams College radio station has hosted an all-night, eight-hour trivia contest. (One 1970 contest did not occur due to a student strike, and the January 2007 broadcast was online-only.) Teams of students, alumni, professors, friends and others compete to answer questions on a variety of subjects, identify songs, and perform designated 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 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. No discernable rivalry exists between any of the various contests. 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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 1980s, 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.

[edit] 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 $1.5 billion as of 6/30/2005.

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.

[edit] Sports

The school's sports teams are called the Ephmen, or the Ephs (pronounced "Eef," or [if] 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).

Williams has had tremendous success winning the NACDA Director's Cup, 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.

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. As an additional reflection of its balanced excellence in academics and athletics, Williams was ranked by the National Collegiate Scouting Association in 2006 as number 1 among all colleges and universities across Divisions I-III. The top five also comprised Amherst, Middlebury, Duke and Stanford in that order.

According to data published by the United States Department of Education^[1], Williams (as of 2004-05) spends more money on its athletic programs than any other Division III school, with the exception of Christopher Newport University (which spends 2% more, but has twice as many students). Williams is ranked #1 among Division III schools for athletic spending per student, spending 20% more per student than its nearest Division III competitor, St. Lawrence University.

Williams has a traditional rivalry with Amherst College and Wesleyan University. The "Little Three," a subset of NESCAC, comprises the three schools. Williams and Amherst participate in notably intense competition, dating back more than a century.

In 2006, the Ephs Football team completed the sixth undefeated season (8-0) in its history, with a win over Amherst.

Until 1994, Williams was not permitted, by NESCAC rules, to compete in team NCAA competition. By virtue of strong individual competitors, 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. Men's basketball also played in the 1997 and 1998 final fours. Williams was the first New England basketball team to have captured a Division III championship.

Other Williams teams to capture national titles since Williams began participating in NCAA tournaments in 1994 include men's tennis (three titles), women's tennis (two), men's cross country (two), women's cross country (two), women's crew (two), women's indoor track and field, and men's soccer. Other perennial contenders include women's lacrosse, women's field hockey, men's golf, men's and women's swimming and diving and men's track and field.

Numerous men's soccer alumni have played in top professional leagues in either the United States or abroad, including former national team member Dan Calichman.

[edit] Club sports

Williams has an active club and intramural sports program, offering 13 club sports including ultimate, rugby, cycling, and water polo.

[edit] 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.^[2] 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 fifteen business, law, and medical schools in the country.^[3] Williams has also produced the most Rhodes Scholars of any liberal arts college in the country, with 37. Brody Admissions, the national admissions and test preparation firm, has ranked Williams 8th in its national "prestige rankings."

[edit] Recent events

In 2003 Williams began the first of three massive construction projects. The $60 million '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 Student Center and $123 million Stetson-Sawyer project, experienced several financial setbacks, but have continued nonetheless with strong support from the Administration and the Board of Trustees. In fact, the new Student Center, named The Paresky Center for its principal donors, David '60 and Linda Paresky, is completed, and has been accessible to students since February 16, 2007.

Construction has already begun on the Stetson-Sawyer project with completion scheduled somewhere by the end of the decade. 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 initially balked at the cost of the Stetson-Sawyer project and were calling for upwards of $17 million 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 poorly executed renovations in prior years.

A recent addition to the campus set the tone for style and comprehensiveness for renovations and significant additions to campus buildings in the 21st century. The $38 million Unified Science Center housing Schow Science Library was erected in 2001 and is popular among students. This building unifies the formerly separate lab spaces of the Physics, Chemistry, and Biology departments. In addition, it houses Schow Science library, notable for its unified science materials holdings and architecture. It features vaulted ceilings and an atrium with windows into laboratories on the second through fourth floors of the science center. In the years since it was constructed some students and staff have complained about the poor acoustics and lack of private study space.

[edit] The Williams House System

After several years of planning, the College has recently decided to group undergraduates into four geographically coherent clusters, or "Neighborhoods," philosophically related to those at several Ivy League universities. Since fall 2006, first-years have been housed in Sage Hall, Williams Hall and Mission Park, while upperclassmen inhabit former 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 "neighborhoods" selected 'Currier', 'Wood', 'Spencer' and 'Dodd' by a simple majority. These were the temporary working names assigned prior to voting. Incoming freshmen are randomly assigned to clusters as an entry (a group of freshmen who live together with a male and female junior advisor). Rising sophomores have the option to be randomly assigned to a different neighborhood from the rest of their entry in groups of six or fewer. This controversial new system is an attempt to integrate all undergraduates more successfully than was previously possible, mixing students representing a variety of interests and ethnicities, and supporting each House with its own dining and recreational facilities. Moreover, this new housing system will attempt to abolish the stigmas allegedly associated with certain dormitories.

[edit] Capital campaign

Williams is currently engaged in one of the largest capital campaigns ever undertaken by a liberal arts college, with a goal of raising $400 million by September, 2008. The college has raised approximately $360 million towards this goal as of the end of 2006. As of June 2005, Williams endowments were valued at approximately $1.5 billion.

[edit] In fiction

• In the syndicated comic, FoxTrot, the father Roger Fox is an alumnus of Willot College, a parody of Williams College. The creator, Bill Amend is a graduate of Amherst College, Williams' long-time rival.

• In the CBS show, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation the lab technician David Hodges is a fictional alumnus of Williams.

• Kaitlin Cooper, a character on Fox's The OC, is shown to be a student of Williams College in the ending montage for the series finale.

• In the movie Meet the Fockers, one of the pictures on the "Wall of Gaylord" shows Ben Stiller's character Gaylord Focker wearing a Williams College t-shirt.

• Benjamin Braddock, the main character of the The Graduate, is widely believed to have attended Williams College.

In the opening sequence of the movie, Dustin Hoffman playing Benjamin Braddock, is wearing a Williams College tie.

• During an episode of the "West Wing," fictional US President Josiah Bartlet discusses why he chose to attend Notre Dame instead of Harvard, Yale, or Williams, noting that each of the prestigious colleges had offered the president-to-be a full scholarship.

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• Elimination of Fraternities at Williams College
• List of Williams College people
• List of Williams College Presidents
• List of Williams College Commencement Speakers
• Williams-Mystic

[edit] External links

• The Williams College website
• Williams College Wiki
• Williams College Archives and Special Collections website
• The Williams Record (college newspaper)
• WCFM Williamstown 91.9 (college radio station)
• Williams Students Online (student-run web services)
• Williams College Museum of Art

[edit] References

New England Small College Athletic Conference
Amherst • Bates • Bowdoin • Colby • Connecticut College • Hamilton • Middlebury • Trinity • Tufts • Wesleyan • Williams