Williams College President
Williamstown, Massachusetts
The Williams Community
At its origin, Williams was — literally — a college at the frontier. It is still what Williams aims to be today.
More than two hundred years ago, in the northwestern corner of America’s first revolutionary state, trustees of the will of Colonel Ephraim Williams created an academy in the wilderness. It was to be a distinctly American educational institution, respectful of church and government, but fully independent from them. Williams imagined itself, from the very start, as part of the great democratic experiment America represented, where students would be admitted not on the basis of wealth and family connections, but on the basis of what they might become, how they might contribute to the country. And like any institution with democratic impulses, and with a sense of its contingency living at the edge of a frontier, Williams must have understood from the beginning that its survival would depend on its adaptability, its willingness to change.
There were times, over the long course of its history, when the College only imperfectly realized these original ideals. But they found dramatic expression in the 1960s and 1970s, when, during the presidency of John Sawyer, Williams began making a series of thoughtful, seamless decisions that created its modern character. Sensing a need to become more welcoming and inclusive, the College abolished fraternities (at the time, an unusual move for a place like Williams), and replaced them with an entirely new residential system. Soon thereafter, Williams admitted women; increased the size of its faculty and student body by nearly half; and began a process of diversifying the racial, ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic identity of its membership.
When institutions change substantially, they run the risk of fracture. Williams is a striking exception. The changes initiated fifty years ago deepened the College’s sense of shared identity and common purpose — not least because they proceeded with the overwhelming support of alumni of all ages, who proved the value of their liberal educations by demonstrating a heartening openness to the wisdom of change and institutional renovation.
The past is prologue to the bold ambition that Williams asserts today: To provide the finest possible liberal arts education. If the goal is immodest, it is also bracing: Elevating the sights and standards of every member of the community, encouraging them to keep faith with the challenge inscribed on the College’s gates — to “climb high, climb far.”
Williams can reach high because it has an extraordinary endowment: its people.
Williams students are among the most talented anywhere. The rigor and competitiveness of the College’s admission process, and its firm commitment to need-blind admissions, place Williams in the company of only a handful of other institutions. Over the past twenty-five years especially, Williams has radically diversified its student body. Now, 20 percent of Williams students are first-generation college students; fully one-third are American underrepresented minorities; seven percent are international students; and 50 percent receive financial aid.
The strength of the student body today is the product of the College’s resolve to search as widely as possible for students of high academic ability and great personal promise. Diversity is not an end in itself, but a principle flowing from the conviction that encountering differences is at the heart of the educational enterprise — differences of opinions and ideas, but also differences of perspectives rooted in the varied histories students bring with them.
Though self-effacing about their abilities, Williams students have a zeal to excel — in the classroom and in the library, on the playing fields and in the performance halls, in their service to the campus and to communities beyond. They are grateful for their educational opportunities, and make the most of them. Their eagerness for serious conversation extends into the informal settings of dining halls and residential houses, where students vigorously debate ideas and explore each other’s interests.
Students help to give Williams its warm, unassuming personality. They take their work seriously, but not always themselves: How could they, in a college whose mascot (for still mysterious reasons) is a purple cow; where the marching band at football games is made up mostly of kazoos; and where the student-led initiative to conserve energy is called “Do it in the Dark.” And they take good care of each other, serving as peer tutors, as Junior Advisors to first-year students, as mentors to newcomers joining co-curricular organizations. They create a strikingly close and compassionate community, and demonstrate a talent for friendship that forges lifelong bonds.
The faculty is not only distinguished, but distinctive. Recruiting from the top graduate programs in the country, Williams asks its faculty to accept an unusual (and unusually demanding) combination of challenges: to be exemplary teachers, productive scholars or artists, and engaged partners in governing the institution. Well supported by the College through research funding and a generous sabbatical program, Williams faculty are leaders in their fields — recognized nationally, and often internationally, for the high quality and significance of their publications and creative work. They also embrace the chance to shape their college, serving in a civic spirit on a broad array of committees, and as officers of an institution that prizes collaborative decision-making.
But it is the teaching gene that especially defines Williams professors. The Williams faculty is remarkable in its devotion to teaching and its ability to instill in students a passionate pleasure in the life of the mind. Faculty members invite students to become partners in the process of intellectual discovery. That partnership becomes visible in every classroom, where students are expected to contribute rather than consume; in the challenging setting of Williams tutorials, where students take the lead in explaining what is interesting and consequential about that week’s assignment; in the College’s programs to engage students directly in faculty research projects (an area, especially in the sciences, where Williams leads nationally); and in a host of other ways.
The curriculum — well rooted in traditional fields, but markedly more interdisciplinary in the past decade — is as rich, varied, and up-to-date as the contemporary world requires. The outside evaluators who conducted the College’s recent reaccreditation visit offered this judgment: “Exceptional in its breadth and excellence, the academic program of Williams College meets even the most stringent expectations, and sets a standard of leadership for liberal arts colleges in the United States.”
But the classroom and curriculum are only the entry points. Professors at Williams want to know not only what their students think, but how they think and who they are. They want to know students in all their dimensions — to learn their histories and hopes, to see them as complex individuals who deserve attention and respect.
Faculty and students together, learning with and from each other in a community whose intimacy of scale fosters close personal and intellectual relationships; where concern for the needs and ideas of other people is not only an educational, but an ethical, imperative; where the values of engagement and decency fundamentally shape the educational process: These are the ideals to which Williams faculty and students aspire.
They have strong partners. Williams is blessed with an enormously talented administrative and support staff; they keenly understand the College’s mission, and devote their energies to advancing it. Williams alumni are fiercely and intelligently loyal, contributing generously of their time, experience, and resources. Far from insisting that the College remain as it was in their time, alumni encourage Williams to reinvent itself for each new generation. Williams trustees — all of whom currently are alumni — provide discerning strategic direction and careful stewardship of the College’s assets. Many trustees have close personal relationships with students, faculty, and staff; but while the board is fully engaged, it keeps its focus on large policy issues and long-term decisions.
Location plays its part in Williams’ success. Surrounded by communities that enthusiastically support and participate in its educational project, Williams is at home in one of the most culturally rich towns in America, with three remarkable museums (the renowned Clark Art Institute, the Williams College Museum of Art, and, in North Adams, Mass MoCA — one of the largest contemporary art museums in the world), the College’s Chapin Library (whose rare book collection is unsurpassed by any college and few universities), the Williamstown Theater Festival (generally regarded as the country’s best summer theater), and other resources.
The landscape, too, helps define the institution. It is celebrated for its natural beauty, its evocative plays of light, its restorative power to beckon outdoors. (Each October, in fact, the President declares a surprise holiday — “Mountain Day” — when the College community collectively skips class to enjoy together the countryside in autumn.) In what may be a fortuitous accident of geography, the Berkshires seem to announce metaphorically the kind of education Williams attempts: at once gentle and dramatic, by turns tranquil and stormy, enclosed — but always opening out into wider, longer views. After a visit in 1844, Henry David Thoreau put it succinctly: “It would be no small advantage if every college were thus located at the base of a mountain.” The physical setting, he concluded, is “as good at least as one well-endowed professorship.”
The President’s House sits within that landscape, at the geographical heart of the campus. Its placement is emblematic of the central role the president plays in the life of the institution. With a long history of distinguished presidents — including the incumbent, Morty Schapiro — Williams is a place where not only presidents, but the presidency itself, are deeply respected. The College community looks to its presidents for leadership; encourages them by embracing their best initiatives, and supports them with loyal criticism; and sees the president not as a distant administrator, but as a collegial partner in a shared effort to create the best possible college.
The president’s centrality is firmly embedded in the College’s governance structure. The president presides at monthly meetings of the faculty where, in the style of a New England town meeting, all major decisions about academic (and many other) policies are debated and voted; the president leads the faculty, but is, at the same time, of the faculty. The Committee on Appointments and Promotions — which oversees faculty allocations, appointments, tenure, and promotion — is technically advisory to the president, but the president sits as a member, and works with its other members (the Provost, Dean of the Faculty, and three elected full professors) to craft a consensus through a process of collegial decision-making.
Leading, but part of: The model finds other forms of expression at Williams. Three senior officers reporting to the president are members of the faculty: the Provost (chief financial officer); the Dean of the Faculty (chief academic officer); and the Dean of the College (who oversees all aspects of student life, academic and residential). All three are drawn from the Williams faculty, and after serving terms that generally range from four to six years, they return to the faculty with a textured sense of the complexities that shape an institution like Williams. This highly unusual arrangement helps ensure that educational values, and a tangible sense of what it takes to teach and learn, are at the core of every decision the College makes. It also helps diminish — almost to a vanishing point — the gulf that in many other places divides presidents from professors, faculty from administrators. At Williams, “they” are “us.”
Williams believes in its mission and is proud of achievements to this point in its history, but the College is not complacent or self-satisfied. There is, if anything, an intelligent kind of restlessness in the Williams community, an abiding desire to do more, do better, and — when there’s reason to — do differently. In its seventeenth president, Williams seeks a vigorous, creative individual who will both join and lead the College community — someone who will celebrate what has already been accomplished, but more importantly, will challenge the College to imagine new possibilities for its future, and advance Williams to its next frontiers.
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