Winter 2012

A Sense of Self

“Leave this place better than how we found it.” Pictured above (from left) are Giglio; Frederick Rudolph ’42, a celebrated historian of American undergraduate education; Michael F. Roizen ’67, chief wellness officer at the Cleveland Clinic; Wilfred Chabrier ’77, general manager of tunnels and bridges for the Port Authority of N.Y. and N.J.; Navjeet K….

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The Red Jacket

Piecing together an artifact of Williams history. Every year, costume director Deborah Brothers gets at least one request from someone wanting to dress up as Col. Ephraim Williams Jr., the college’s founder. Now, thanks to the help of classics major Mattie Mitchell ’12, she is much closer to being able to create an authentic set…

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Community Roots

Twenty percent of Northern Berkshire households have limited access to nutritious food. Michael Gallagher ’06 and his Square Roots Farm are helping to change that. At the end of Daniels Road in Clarksburg, Mass., near the bottom of a mountain, is a flat, open plot of land. Vestiges of its prior use are scattered across…

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How to Pay Attention to a Poem

Like any poem, Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is best read with what Henry James called “the spirit of fine attention.” It’s about “noticing, and then noticing what you notice,” says English professor Lawrence Raab, who teaches and writes his own poetry just 22 miles from the Vermont town where Frost…

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A Nashville Cat

  “I experienced a love of music at full-moon parties where musicians and pickers went to a great old antebellum house and played music. It was almost otherworldly.” —Marcus Hummon ’84, on finding a creative home in Nashville There are the hits: “Cowboy Take Me Away,” recorded by the Dixie Chicks. Wynonna Judd’s “Only Love.”…

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Reading Africa

“After the television images, the photographs and the news stories, come the writers.” Course description for Aminatta Forna’s “Witness Literature” In researching her latest novel, The Memory of Love, Aminatta Forna came across an unsettling statistic about her homeland. According to Doctors Without Borders, more than 90 percent of Sierra Leone’s population suffered from post-traumatic…

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Further Afield

Williams professors in the news Blacks were taught in their homes, churches and schools how to handle discrimination from whites—“how they had to be quiet, how to talk back with their eyes, how to resist or to fight back without actually raising a hand or raising their voices,” history professor Leslie Brown says in a…

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Race to First Place

Cross country runner Chiara Del Piccolo ’14 finished the 2011 season with the Div. III NCAA Cross Country Championship title and a 6-kilometer time of 20:52.08. But Del Piccolo didn’t begin the season as the number-one Eph. In fact, over the last year she’s improved from 55th in the nation to number one. Del Piccolo says…

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Reading “Fun Home”

Over Winter Study, students, faculty and staff are exploring Alison Bechdel’s award-winning graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, for Williams Reads, now in its sixth year. Check out http://bit.ly/wmsreads for a full schedule of lectures, discussions and other events related to the book.

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Chomsky Leads Off Public Affairs Forum

Is there such a thing as humanitarian intervention? It’s a question public intellectual and activist Noam Chomsky pondered during a September lecture that packed the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance’s MainStage. Humanitarian intervention, Chomsky argued, has become inherently political, rarely carried out without ulterior motives. In the past, he said, the argument was that…

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From Hurt Comes Hope

In the days following the discovery of a racist and violent message scrawled on a wall inside Prospect House, more than 1,000 students, faculty and staff came together to support each other and work toward building a stronger, more inclusive community. The crime was still under investigation by Campus Safety and Security, Williamstown Police and…

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Big Thinking

On Nov. 1, the campus was treated to another installment of the Williams Thinking lecture series. Questions explored by faculty this time around were: What was the Greatest Revolution? The Iranian revolution “brought back religion as an entity, as a force to be reckoned with in politics and in government. … It changed how we…

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Spencer Elected President of Bates

A. Clayton Spencer ’77, who has served on the Williams College board of trustees since 2003, was elected president of Bates College in December. Spencer currently serves as vice president for policy at Harvard University and has worked for four Harvard presidents to shape key initiatives over the past 15 years. She also was chief…

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Song

I am glad to see that informal Williams singing groups are flourishing (“Eph Cappella,” June 2011). But the sidebar assumed there were no such groups in the 1950s. To the contrary, the Williams Octet continued its concerts, drawing members from the more formally organized Williams College Choir and the Williams Glee Club. The Octet continued…

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Community

In “The Community We Aspire to Be” (June 2011), President Falk notes the greater diversity of students and that neither diversity nor tolerance alone are enough. He says the College’s “mission to prepare leaders must surely include engaging students with the diverse society they will graduate to serve.” Left unanswered though, is how. Neither study…

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Sky

Jay Pasachoff’s wonderful article in the September 2011 issue (“9 Things You Should Know About Our Universe”) made me wish I were back in his class at Williams. Thank you, Professor Pasachoff, for keeping us looking at the sky! —David Wagner ’86, Boston, Mass.

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Dignity

During my time at Williams I was often surprised by how limited the institutional memory of students, myself included, could be. Because much of what we knew about our school was what we had witnessed, I wondered if we were leaving with only a thin, blurry concept of the world we’d been so fortunate to…

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Details

Bethany McLean ’92 (“Devils in the Details,” September 2011) is trying to wake Americans up to what is being done to our country. Something is profoundly wrong when so much wealth is directed into speculation and asset capture instead of real asset creation. We have forgotten that the economy is a tool, a set of…

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On Expectations and Change

As the legacy of legendary professor Bob Gaudino reminds us, learning is often most powerful in times of discomfort and even pain. I’m reminded of that as the Williams community has been responding to the discovery of a horrible, racist message on a wall inside Prospect House. Photos of the events that followed, along with…

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