Williams College
Self-Study for Accreditation
Mission and Purposes
Williams seeks to provide the finest possible liberal arts education by nurturing in students the academic and civic virtues, and their related traits of character. Academic virtues include the capacities to explore widely and deeply, think critically, reason empirically, express clearly, and connect ideas creatively. Civic virtues include commitment to engage both the broad public realm and community life, and the skills to do so effectively. These virtues, in turn, have associated traits of character. For example, free inquiry requires open-mindedness, and commitment to community draws on concern for others.
We are committed to our central endeavor of academic excellence in a community of learning that comprises students, faculty, and staff. We recruit students from among the most able in the country and abroad and select them for the academic and personal attributes they can contribute to the educational enterprise, inside and outside the classroom. Our faculty is a highly talented group of teachers, scholars, and artists committed deeply to the education of our students and to involving them in their efforts to expand human knowledge and understanding through original research, thought, and artistic expression. Dedicated staff enable this teaching and learning to take place at the highest possible level, as does the involvement and support of our extraordinarily loyal alumni, parents, and friends.
No one can pretend to more than guess at what students now entering college will be called upon to comprehend in the decades ahead. No training in fixed techniques, no finite knowledge now at hand, no rigid formula can solve problems whose shape we cannot yet define. The most versatile, the most durable, in an ultimate sense, the most practical knowledge and intellectual resources that we can offer students are the openness, creativity, flexibility, and power of education in the liberal arts.
Toward that end we extend a curriculum that offers wide opportunities for learning, ensures close attention of faculty to students but also encourages students to learn independently, and reflects the complexity and diversity of the world. We seek to do this in an atmosphere that nurtures the simple joy of learning as a lifelong habit and commitment.
We place great emphasis on the learning that takes place in the creation of a functioning community: life in the residence halls, expression through the arts, debates on political issues, leadership in campus governance, exploration of personal identity, pursuit of spiritual and religious impulses, the challenge of athletics, and direct engagement with human needs, nearby and far away.
To serve well our students and the world, we embrace core values such as welcoming and supporting in the College community people from all segments of our increasingly diverse society and ensuring that College operations are environmentally sustainable.
From this holistic immersion students learn more than they will ever know. Such is the testimony of countless graduates — that their Williams experience has equipped them to live fuller, more effective lives. Ultimately, the College’s greatest mark on the world consists of this: the contributions our alumni make in their professions, their communities, and their personal lives.
Therefore, we ask all our students to understand that an education at Williams should not be regarded as a privilege destined to create further privilege, but as a privilege that creates opportunities to serve society at large, and imposes the responsibility to do so.
At the same time, being itself privileged by its history and circumstances, Williams understands its own responsibility to contribute by thought and example to the world of higher education.
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The above description arises on its surface from public statements made by Williams presidents and others associated with the College, from which it borrows, and at a deeper level from the felt experience of students, faculty, staff, alumni, and parents over many decades. The current wording was shaped by discussion with the Faculty Steering Committee and the Self Study Committee and approved by vote of the Board of Trustees on April 14, 2007.
The understandings that it expresses have shaped major College actions since the last self study, as an appraisal of the period since then reveals.
Expanding the faculty by 20 per cent broadened the curriculum and lowered average class size. In particular it supported an increase in the number of tutorial courses from 21 in 2000-01 to 62 in 2006-07. Expansion also enabled faculty to develop courses through which students could meet new requirements in intensive writing and in quantitative or formal reasoning.
We have expanded the ways in which students can connect their growing knowledge with the world through experiential learning. Seventy one courses in 2006-07 included a significant experiential component (26 semester courses and 45 in Winter Study) and this spirit animates our new program of Williams in New York, in which students combine tutorial study and field work with government agencies, non-profit organizations, and businesses along with meetings in which alumni discuss how their education affects their life work.
In appreciation that learning and academic skills increasingly cut across traditional academic departments, we have expanded curricular offerings that combine the perspectives of more than one discipline. Regarding learning outside the curriculum, we have launched two major initiatives. We designed the new Paresky Center to draw together students, faculty, and staff for informal and formal interactions, and it already does so on a scale much greater than the building it replaced. At the same time we developed a new residential life system, in which students belong to one of four neighborhoods — mini communities that afford more natural opportunities than in the recent past for students to connect with those outside their circles of affinity and class year. The neighborhoods also provide an additional way for students to interact with faculty outside their areas of greatest academic interest.
The Paresky Center is only one of several major new facilities we have added to advance our mission and purposes. The ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance greatly expanded the College community’s ability to develop skills in those disciplines and to experience world-class productions integrated with the broader curriculum. Since the last self study, we opened a Science Center, which contains updated labs and a unified science library, along with offices, classrooms, study rooms, and informal meeting spaces that encourage the interaction among faculty and students that are an essential part of our mission. Construction is now underway to provide equally effective office, teaching, and meeting spaces for the humanities and social sciences, and we will soon begin construction of a major new library building that will update facilities for library and information technology resources.
Since 1997 Williams has also made itself significantly more diverse and taken many steps to move toward the goal of making this College community one in which all members can thrive, including those from historically underrepresented groups. Details are in following sections of this document and in the Diversity Initiatives Self Study and the “List of Diversity Initiatives Undertaken from 2004 through 2006” (both in Team Room). Other recent steps have included expansion of our need-blind admission policy to include international applicants and reductions in the level of loans expected of financial-aid students, in many cases to zero, and replacement of them with grants.
Regarding the environmental sustainability of our operations, we have long worked to control these impacts but earlier this year set the ambitious goal of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to 10 per cent below their 1990-91 levels by the year 2020 and have begun to marshal the resources, human and financial, to attain it.
Looking to the future, Williams has a clear sense of its mission that is unlikely to change in the years ahead. Our challenges are to follow through on the steps taken in recent years to advance that mission and to adapt continually how we pursue it in light of changes in the world in which the College operates and which it serves. We will need to pay particular attention to two factors.
One is increasing globalization. We must continue to think about our roles in an increasingly interconnected world. How best do we prepare students to live in and contribute to that world? Must our curriculum expand further? How international should our own College community become? How should we balance the aspiration to serve the wider world with Williams’ historic and legal commitments to U.S. society?
Another continuing factor of change is technology, not only in how it contributes to the “flattening” of the world that is associated with globalization but in its effects on how education can take place. Can we use technology to enlarge the circle of people who take part in classroom and campus discussion? Can it expand what it means to be part of the Williams campus? How can we adapt it for use in an educational model that stresses personal interaction among faculty and students?
Meanwhile the broader, technology-connected world contains less understanding of and appreciation for the liberal arts education that is our focus. While aware that liberal arts education is not valued in most sections of the world, we are encouraged by statements from international figures about the world’s need for flexible, creative leaders and by attempts here and there to replicate the liberal arts model, in some cases patterned specifically on Williams. But how responsible is Williams to advance the liberal arts ideal beyond our historic circles of influence? And if we bear such responsibility, how best might we fulfill it?
Those are among the questions Williams is likely to face in the coming decade as we focus on the mission to which the College has been committed for centuries and which consequently we know is our very core.
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