Articles by Robert White

Three months, nine days, and 5,000 km was all it took for Alex Bain ’11 and Sarah Tory ’11 to bike from the north of Argentina to Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world. And where in the world did they get the idea? According to their blog:

“The idea for our trip to Patagonia started one fateful night of Williams Bowling Club, when Sarah mentioned her desire to bike through South America.  This was a reasonable goal for her–she had already biked across the U.S. and liked to do strange things like run (quickly) for pleasure. Her only difficulty was finding someone with no job a sense of adventure and a willingness to sleep outside.

“Alex thought biking across Patagonia sounded like a good  idea. This was a slightly unreasonable goal for him–he did not even own a bicycle, and since “retiring” from football sophomore year to go read books in England, he had discovered that sustained exercise is an un-admirable excess of the young and foolish.  But he didn’t want life to turn into this, and, er, the mountains beckoned…”

Having checked off this bucket-list item, Bain will complete pre-med requirements at Bryn Mawr and Tory will begin Columbia University’s writing MFA program.

Read more about their journey and view the route map.

Williams’ latest literary and arts publication is the outcome of a Winter Study project this past January. Under the sharp eyes of professors Jim Shepard and Gage McWeeny, English majors Mia Fry ’13 and Alyssa Northrop ’14 aimed to create a venue for student work that encompassed many different media. Online was clearly the way to go.

Each month Babble solicits submissions from across campus around a common theme. (This month it’s “Childhood and Memories.”) According to Northrop, Babble aims to “be a place where the thoughts of the student body are given a voice.” Read it here.

(Frontpage photo by Babble contributor Katherine Belk ’13)

The warm-up game for 93 8th graders is simple.  Pick one of three words: “stop,” “go,” or “listen.”  When it’s your turn, stand up and face your peers, then speak your word loudly and clearly.  Sit down, and it’s on to the next student.  The game’s coach and referee is Kairav Sinha, a first-year Williams student who’s reshaping the public speaking curriculum at Williamstown’s Mt. Greylock Regional School.

Sinha came to Williams via Leland High School in San Jose, Calif. At Leland, speech and debate are essentially varsity sports, involving a quarter of its 1,600 students.  Joining the team as a 9th grader, Sinha finished as high as 8th place in statewide speech contests. He also led another kind of success, talking 200 of his fellow high schoolers into outreach efforts with hundreds of middle-school and elementary-school students.

Arriving in Williamstown, Sinha quickly found his way to Rick Spalding, Williams’ chaplain and coordinator of community service. Spalding introduced him to Kaatje White, director of the Williams Center at Mt. Greylock, who facilitates academic engagement between the school and the college. This connection, and a warm welcome from grateful Mt. Greylock 8th-grade teachers, allowed Sinha to start volunteering in the school weeks after arriving on campus. “This was completely win-win,” says White. “Kairav presented a curricular and pedagogical toolbox that teachers and students could benefit from immediately.”

Age-appropriate exercises are key.  Sinha’s high school mentor, Gay Brasher, developed the lesson modules Sinha uses at Mt. Greylock. Enunciation drills include tongue-twisters (“The big black bug bit the big black bear.”), while two-person skits stress storytelling through inflection. Fourteen-year-olds eagerly rehearse dialogues to present to their classmates. Sinha’s refrain—“Eyes up here!”—reminds antsy students that part of being a good speaker is being a good audience.

Sinha’s work with 8th graders has yielded results already. Mt. Greylock’s annual constitutional debates usually surface a few students who are truly terrified to speak in public. Thanks in part to Sinha’s work, says history teacher Pat Blackman, “Our two students who were most terrified were confident enough to participate on their teams, and indeed did so with the appearance of poise.”

Sinha’s newly founded club “Williams Speak!” aims to connect 25 Williams students with more than 600 local students across five grade levels this spring.  In addition to Mt. Greylock, these undergraduate volunteers will reach students at Williamstown Elementary School, Lanesborough School, Berkshire Arts & Technology Charter Public School in Adams, and Brayton Elementary School in North Adams.

Not bad for a guy half way through his first year at Williams.

Watch this (very) humorous debate between Colin Adams, Thomas T. Reed Professor of Mathematics, and his colleague Tom Garrity, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Mathematics, moderated by President Adam Falk on First-Year Family Days, October 29, 2011. Professor Adams also has the last word in this “All Things Considered” story on the beauty of mathematics.

Bilal Ansari wastes no time.

Williams’ first Muslim chaplain and associate coordinator of community engagement arrived on campus on August 28, 2011. By August 31 he was hosting a feast for Muslim students to celebrate the end of Ramadan and helping lead Williamstown efforts to support residents flooded out of The Spruces mobile home park by Hurricane Irene.

Boundlessly energetic, eminently approachable, and seriously funny, Ansari brings years of wider-world experience to his new dual role: supporting Williams’ growing population of Muslim students while offering all Williams students rich opportunities to serve their local community.

Here’s what he has to say about his life-to-date and new job:

How did you come to Islam?

My father got there first; he founded San Francisco’s first mosque. My mother’s an evangelist minister who serves in prisons throughout Connecticut; her own parents led a Pentecostal church in New Haven. So I grew up with both black American religious paradigms:  Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Ultimately, my heart and mind found their home in my paternal religious roots.

What were you doing before you came to Williams?

Organizing Connecticut grassroots movements in affordable housing, labor, community empowerment, economic development, and universal healthcare. I also founded the Muslim Chaplains Association, a resource for chaplains of all faiths who address the needs of Muslims in their institutions. That’s meant organizing national conferences, writing peer-reviewed journal articles, and lecturing on Muslim chaplaincy throughout America and in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

How do the two halves of your Williams job intersect?

If someone reduced my life’s work to a few meaningful words, they would read: “Muslim Chaplain and Associate Coordinator of Community Engagement.” It’s amazing how exactly these two seemingly unrelated roles—one sacred, the other secular—come together in one Williams job. When I applied for it, I looked for an intersection of these roles in the college’s mission and purpose and found it here: “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.”

What are your Williams aspirations?

I aspire to enact Williams’ ideals as Muslim chaplain by focusing primarily on students’ exploration of personal identity and the pursuit of spiritual and religious impulses. My aspirations for community engagement, again, are rooted in the development of a healthy community that organizes resident halls from separated neighbors and distant “hoods” to directly engaged neighborhoods. These aspirations are inseparable within me personally: I wish every student at Williams, religious or not, learn how to meet unmet human needs, nearby and far away.
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View a PBS video of Bilal’s former prison ministry here and his seminal “sermon to the cheese fries” here.

On Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2011, in Williams’ ’62 Center, Bill McKibben discussed global warming, alternative energy, and localized economies in a talk titled “Global and Local: Reports from the Fight for a Working Planet.”  View his presentation below. For more about McKibben and his talk, read on.

Adam Baron ’10 can laugh now as he recounts his convoluted early career path.  After majoring in Arabic Studies and spending a semester in Egypt, he thought he might be headed to Wall Street.  But an interviewer in a major financial firm observed that while Baron was clearly qualified, he was just as clearly uninterested in a career in investment banking.

So Baron found himself free to pursue his fascination with the Middle East.  As a way to return to the region that was “in his blood” he signed on to teach in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, a “picture-perfect medieval Arab city.”  Baron planned to teach English while looking for something that interested him more.

With a start date of January 2011, it didn’t take long for “something more interesting” to come his way.  Small demonstrations near the university gained momentum through the spring, spilling out of “Change Square” and disrupting the status quo.  In the words of Baron’s friend and demonstrator leader, “at this point the revolution has become our national sport.”

For an adrenaline junky with a love of politics, the situation was fascinating.  Baron sent his c.v. and writing samples to McClatchy Newspapers, which  hired him as a special correspondent in April. In May, Baron resigned from his teaching position to free up more time for reporting.

Only 23, but an American with Arabic language skills and an international platform, Baron uses his privileged position “telling stories that wouldn’t be told” without his voice.  One article describes how some women and children in rural Yemen have sought refuge in caves to escape shelling of their village homes.  Other write-ups quote a wide range of sources, from the president to youth activists, ex-soldiers and educators.

In addition to his professional journalism, Baron maintains a lively blog filled with photos, explanatory captions, notes and essays.  It reads like letters from a smart, funny friend who just happens to be writing from Yemen, zipping around the capital on the back of motorcycle taxis, observing and recording everyday life during “an incredible time of development and change.”

Graduate school is a possibility at some point, but for now Baron is excited to use his unique skill set in a part of the world with few western journalists.  “In Yemen or other places in the Arab world, people my age are overthrowing governments.  It’s so incredibly inspiring to be around.”

Read Adam Baron’s McClatchy articles , check out his blog, or follow him on Twitter.

On September 15, 2011, Noam Chomsky shared his thoughts on the consequences (intended and otherwise) of what we habitually think of as humanitarian intervention.  A prominent American public intellectual and activist, Chomsky has written and lectured extensively on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual history, international affairs, and foreign policy.

For an elegantly informative introduction of Professor Chomsky by Associate Professor of English Christian Thorne, go here.

Professor Chomsky’s remarks kicked off the 2011 Williams College Class of ’71 Public Affairs Forum, a series of lectures throughout the fall semester on humanitarian concerns, human rights, and different approaches to direct action around the world. For more about the Class of ’71 Public Affairs Forum read on.