Williams College
Self-Study for Accreditation
Students
Since the last self study, we have increased the academic potential and diversity of entering classes, greatly enhanced student support services, and revamped the residential life system. These developments work together to enrich students’ educational opportunities in all aspects of their College experience.
Admission and Financial Aid
Admission to Williams is highly selective, as nearly all applicants possess stellar academic credentials yet we can admit fewer than one in five. As described in our mission statement: “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.” We seek top students from a broad range of ethnic, racial, and socio-economic backgrounds so that our residential learning environment resembles the world our students leave here prepared to serve. Recent changes in admission policies have been part of our College-wide effort to increase diversity on campus and to maximize the educational benefit of that diversity.
Assembling the most talented and diverse student body possible requires our continued commitment to need-blind admission and full, need-based aid. We admit students, from abroad as well as from the U.S., without regard to their ability to pay and promise to meet for four years 100 per cent of each family’s demonstrated financial need. In addition, we have in recent years taken steps to increase the percentage of our aid packages consisting of grant.
Roughly 30 per cent of recent classes identify as American students of color. Another seven per cent are non-U.S. citizens, from 25 countries. The increase in the number and quality of our international students over the past five years results from the extension of our need-blind admission policy to foreign students beginning in 2002-03. Williams is one of a handful of colleges and universities to be need-blind for all students, regardless of citizenship.
For the past three years, we have intensified our recruitment of domestic students of high ability and low income. Impetus for this came from research (in the Team Room) suggesting that the most selective colleges and universities did not attract socio-economically diverse applicant pools, and that particularly missing were students from families in the bottom two national income quintiles (typically earning less that $40,000 a year).
Beginning with the recruitment of the Class of 2009, we began a multi-pronged initiative to increase the low-income applicant pool. First, we began using a College Board service called Descriptor Plus, which uses geo-demographic data to identify high-achieving students from low-income neighborhoods. This allows us to target the most needy prospective students and emphasize financial-aid opportunities and affordability in that segment of our Student Search direct mailings.
Second, to expand our contacts with counselors and community outreach program directors we began an annual summer visitation program in which we identify 20-30 professionals from across the country who work with low-income students and then fly the professionals here to become familiar with Williams and our aid programs. New gifts to endowment support this program and another one that enables our admission officers to visit more low-income areas of the country.
A third initiative has been to modify our fall diversity weekends, which had focused exclusively on underrepresented students of color, to include low-income students of all racial backgrounds. Over two weekends in the fall, we fly (or bus) in about 210 prospective students who otherwise would not have the opportunity to visit campus.
The fourth — and possibly most fruitful — initiative has been a partnership with QuestBridge, an organization that identifies high-ability, low-income students and matches them with highly selective colleges. (A description of the QuestBridge process is in the Diversity Initiatives Self Study, in Team Room.) Since we joined in 2005, roughly seven percent of each incoming class has been identified through this program. Virtually all are full- or high-need students with exceptional academic promise.
Our first year of these initiatives produced significant increases in the percentage of students qualifying for aid and a significant drop in the average family income of those receiving aid. Of the 536 members of the Class of 2009, 49 per cent qualified for institutional financial aid — up from just over 40 percent in the previous decade. A full 20 per cent were from families with incomes below $60,000, including 11 per cent below $30,000. At the same time, the academic indices (SATs, GPAs) for this class were stronger than ever. Though not quite so dramatic, the Class of 2010 saw similar results. We hope to continue this momentum to further enhance the socio-economic diversity of future classes.
We also have made significant new investments in financial aid. In addition to extending need-blind admission and full, need-based aid to international students, we have since the last self study reduced loan and job expectations for all aided students.
Because of our sense that debt loads were restricting students’ post-graduate opportunities, in 2001-02 we reduced the maximum four-year loan burden from $18,000 to $14,000 and implemented a stepped loan obligation. Students from the lowest-income families moved to a maximum four-year obligation of $4,000 and those from the next income quintile to $8,000. The following year we began to credit outside scholarships and grants against loan expectations first and then against expected job earnings. Previously, we had used a portion of outside aid to offset College grant. In 2004-05, we moved to zero loan expectation for students from families with calculated parental contributions of less than $1,000. We reduced other loan steps modestly as well: families with parental contributions of less than $4,000 have four-year loan obligations of $3,800, those with parental contributions of less than $7,000 now borrow up to $7,800, while the maximum obligation is $13,800.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts raised the minimum wage rate by 75 cents per hour in 2006 and again in 2007. We chose to hold constant our academic-year expectations from on-campus jobs, in effect reducing the number of hours students need to work to meet earnings expectations. For students with parental contributions of less than $4,000 we also reduced summer earnings expectations by $650 each summer and expanded grants to cover the cost of College-provided student health insurance. We are pleased that these efforts have increased the percentage of students on financial aid and that the number from the lowest family-income quintiles has increased as well. The Class of 2009 had 49 per cent of students receiving Williams-based aid and the Class of 2010 was almost as high at 47 per cent. Both classes have 45 per cent of students of color receiving aid.
To better accommodate the growing number of students from more diverse socio-economic backgrounds, we have examined all aspects of student life to find, and reduce where possible, hidden costs. An example was the contribution, often in excess of $100, that junior advisors had come to expect from all first-years to support first-year entry social events. In return for JAs ending this unofficial practice, we provided funds they can use to support such events. To help all students better plan their finances at the College, we hired and assisted a student to produce in the Summer of 2006 a “Savvy Spenders Guide to Williams,” which went to all students (in Team Room). It was so well received that in 2007 we also sent it over the summer to the parents of all entering students.
Even as we increase the number and percentage of students receiving aid, we recognize that to realize fully our goal of making a Williams education accessible to all who are academically able we must do still more. A significant part of our current comprehensive fund-raising campaign is devoted to raising additional endowment for scholarships. And we continue to seek ways to inform, recruit, and attract traditionally underrepresented students. The steps described above — the targeted direct mail, the visitation program for counseling professionals, the increased visits by admission officers to low-income areas, and the partnership with QuestBridge — represent a promising start, but we want to do more.
Support of Student Learning
The most significant addition and improvement to our student support services since the last self study has been the creation in 2005-06 of the Academic Resource Center, now housed in the new student center. A description of the ARC’s major programs is in the Team Room.
Previous to the creation of the ARC, academic support for students had been fragmented. No one individual — staff or faculty — oversaw the programs we had in place. The ARC is overseen by a Director and a .8 FTE Program Assistant. The Director, an academic with a Ph.D. in anthropology and experience running academic support programs at a major research university, reports to the Dean of the College and works collaboratively with various academic and administrative departments and with many student constituencies to develop peer systems for support. We thus have consolidated our operations for students with disabilities, peer tutoring, the Math and Science Resource Center, and the Writing Workshop. In addition, we are establishing new modes of academic support for students, including improvement of services for students with disabilities. The ARC aims to support work at all levels of performance, not just those students needing remedial help.
In the last two years, we have greatly improved our use of technology in delivering these services — increasing our efficiency and enabling students who receive accommodations for documented learning disabilities to work more independently. The Director of the ARC has reached out to students who, due to financial circumstances, would likely not have been tested for disabilities and not had access to services at their underserved secondary schools. College funding is now available to test such students so they can qualify for accommodations and services here.
We have also identified weaknesses and gaps in our academic tutoring program. We have addressed some; others will take time to remedy. One example of a service that we have improved substantially is Peer Tutoring. Prior to recent ARC initiatives, peer tutors had received little or no training. There had been no formal evaluation system, no thoughtful pairing of students, and limited quality control. While some tutors were nominated by faculty, many signed up simply because it was a reasonably well paying job. The Dean’s Office had maintained a list of tutors, and students seeking help were referred to the notebook in the Dean’s Office or Website to arrange for help. Based on discussions with students and faculty, we determined that the system was too passive and that it required students to take Herculean steps to get help. This was antithetical to the notion of an academic resource center, in which the threshold for support should be as low as possible. Also, our choice to depend on student labor for our academic support programs imposes the obligation to choose tutors carefully and give them the tools they need to help their peers (which also aid their own academic work).
In the Spring of 2006, three student coordinators and the ARC Director examined the Math and Science Resource Center (which had been deemed highly successful) to apply its best practices to a revamped Peer Tutoring Program. Focus groups and other discussions resulted in substantial changes. Instead of students picking tutors on-line, we now purposefully match tutors with individual requests. We have put in place evaluation systems. The ARC works more closely with academic departments and programs in identifying prospective tutors. And, in the Fall of 2006, we introduced the first-ever training sessions for tutors. We contracted with the organization Learning Skills to provide a workshop on study skills training for 20 students. We invited to the workshop selected tutors, student leaders, and some students who had experienced academic difficulty. A new Study Skills Corps, a sub-group of peer tutors, then modified the workshop materials to develop a workshop on student-to-student training in study skills. A pilot with about 15 students has evolved into student training sessions on study skills and tutoring protocols that we now require all peer tutors to attend.
We have engaged other consultants to assess our programs, run workshops for students and faculty, and help us develop workshops we can run ourselves. One operation in which this is just beginning is the Writing Workshop, a longstanding program in which student tutors help other students to develop, organize, and refine written work. In the Fall of 2006, a writing consultant helped us develop workshops and training sessions for these tutors. The consultant’s work spawned a larger discussion of support for writing across the curriculum. Given that we recently added a writing-intensive requirement to the curriculum, proper support for students and faculty in this area is critical. For the past several years, consultants have run well-received workshops for faculty on the teaching of writing. The question remains whether the College should staff such a position itself.
We require that all students successfully complete by graduation one course involving a significant amount of quantitative or formal reasoning (QFR). Our Quantitative Studies Program exists to identify early those students with inadequate quantitative skills and to address them with respect to the QFR requirement and to students’ academic goals.
Williams has an excellent record of recruiting bright and talented students from disadvantaged backgrounds. They often have gaps in their high school education, and many fall into demographic categories that are underrepresented among majors in economics, math, and science. It is thus particular important to identify and address any weakness early in their time here. When they arrive, all first-years take our Quantitative Skills Assessment (QSA) — a 20-question multiple-choice paper exam on a variety of topics in pre-calculus.
Based on the QSA result, math SAT/ACT scores, and previous math courses taken, we identify about 50 to 70 incoming students who may be at risk when fulfilling the QFR requirement and call them in for an interview. During this interview we discuss any difficulties the student experienced in math and science courses and what subjects the student is interested in pursuing. We explain the QFR and Division III requirements, inform them of campus resources available to help them, and develop a strategy to fulfill these requirements and meet their goals. For some students, about ten to 16 each year, we will require them to take a Quantitative Studies course (Math 101 or 102) before proceeding to a QFR course.
For this self study, we interviewed seniors who had been required as first-years to take pre-statistics (Math 101) or pre-calculus (Math 102). All commented favorably about their experiences in these courses. They described them as non-intimidating, confidence-building, slower-paced than others, and small enough to provide a more personal interaction with the instructor and with other students. Pre-calculus students reported being well prepared mathematically for their subsequent calculus course.
More than half of those interviewed, however, reported problems when they went on to take a large-section science or economics class. These courses were faster-paced and less personal, with less instructor contact and with large TA sessions where it was hard to get help with particular struggles. It was a difficult transition to move into these classes from the more nurturing Math 101/102 environment.
To address this problem, we formalized follow-up procedures for students after they complete these courses. Starting this year, we will check in with them early in the semester in which they take their first QFR class. We would like this more active intervention also to benefit some students who were not required to take Math 101 or 102, so we have added a fourth category of students we interview during orientation, called WATCH. (An explanation of these classifications is in Appendix D.) We will monitor these students more closely than we did their predecessors, allowing for early intervention and support. Students with PRECALC or PRESTAT status will graduate to WATCH status after completing Math 101 or 102, and students will remain on WATCH status until they successfully complete a QFR course. We anticipate about 16 to 20 students on our WATCH list.
Because of growth in this program we have created a Quantitative Studies Coordinator position, held by a faculty member with compensation and course-load reduction, to support the faculty member who supervises the program.
As part of our analysis, we also compared the four-year experiences of seniors who had been required to take Math 101 or 102 with those of a comparison group who had scored only slightly higher on the QSA. The 19 students required to take Math 101 or 102 went on to take an average of three QFR courses with a GPA of 2.38, and took an average of 4.1 Division III courses with a GPA of 2.74. This group included four pre-med students. The 16 students in the comparison group took an average of 2.8 QFR courses with a GPA of 2.87 and 3.8 Division III courses with a GPA of 2.99. This group included three pre-meds. Averages for the whole Class of 2007 are 6.6 QFR with a GPA of 3.33 and 6.8 Division III classes with a GPA of 3.36. While both groups that we counseled in 2003 lag behind the class as a whole, the group that we required to take a QS course took as many or more Division III courses as the next higher group.
Student Services
Our student affairs operation has undergone dramatic consolidation, expansion, and change. Services are now organized more rationally and better supported overall. In particular, we have increased staffing in academic support, campus life/residential life, career counseling, and community service. These increases have enabled new initiatives and better delivery of services. The offices that report to the Dean of the College (Academic Resource Center, Campus Life, Career Counseling, Chaplains, Health Center, Registrar, Safety and Security) work with a high degree of coordination and interdependency. Many also depend highly on students for leadership, energy, and ideas, as Williams continues to be characterized by a high level of student independence and autonomy.
Student rights and responsibilities are stated in the Student Handbook (in Team Room), communicated through orientation materials and programs, and modeled by our junior advisors (often called JAs, these are juniors selected through a highly selective, student-run process to live in entries with first-years to help smooth their transition to college life). The Dean of the College adjudicates disciplinary issues other than Honor Code violations, with the student having the right to appeal the Dean’s decision to the Honor and Discipline Committee, composed of students and faculty. The Dean’s Office and Registrar’s Office maintain student records according to FERPA guidelines as described in the handbook. Periodically, legal counsel briefs staff on FERPA and other issues.
Health Services
Health Services combines medical services, psychological counseling services, and health education. Its goal is to enhance students’ academic success by providing confidential, accessible, high quality, wellness-oriented, physical and psychological healthcare to all students. Our approach to health education and awareness promotes healthy lifestyles and the development of life skills that last beyond college.
We accomplish this by supplying a wide range of preventive and medical services, including treatment for illness and injury, management of existing medical problems, and care and advice for any health concern. The Health Center is open weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. and weekends from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. and is staffed by a nurse practitioner and five registered nurses. Health Educators are available for individual consultations with students on health issues such as eating disorders and body image concerns, stress management, rape and sexual assault, harassment, and sexual health. Staff also provide substance abuse education and counseling.
In August of 2006 a registered dietician joined the staff. She is available to individual students for therapeutic intervention and does significant outreach to and educational sessions for athletic teams, residential life staff, and junior advisors as well as to staff through the Wellness Committee. Staff also train student groups such as Peer Health, the Rape and Sexual Assault Network, the Public Health Alliance, and junior advisors. The Director of Health Services coordinates the Sexual Assault Response Team that offers assistance to survivors of sexual assault.
We contract with a multi-specialty group for physician services. The group provides after-hour coverage so students always have access to care. Additional services are available in a twice-weekly orthopedic clinic staffed by contracted physicians. We maintain a strong working relationship with the local community hospital, North Adams Regional, further ensuring students’ access to care.
We offer comprehensive psychological counseling to all students. Services include psychiatric evaluations, individual or group therapy, crisis intervention, and medication evaluations, treatment, and follow-up. Students are seen by appointment Monday through Friday and a counselor is on call every evening and on weekends. The service is staffed by clinicians, including a psychiatrist, with a wide range of experience dealing with the issues that students most experience. Psychological Counseling staff participate in the training of residential life staff, junior advisors, and peer health educators. Students rightly complain about the lack of racial diversity in our counseling staff, but repeated attempts to increase the diversity of hiring pools over the years have not been successful. These efforts have included the advertising of openings in a much larger than usual geographic area and making them known to our alumni of color. We also have struggled with cultural resistance to psychological counseling. To address it, our clinicians have increased their outreach, particularly through participation in Multicultural Center events, and have pursued training in cultural competency. In recent years, the use of psychological counseling by students of color has finally approximated closely that of white students.
We review the Health Center’s hours and services each year to ensure suitability for students. We gather input regarding hours, services, and general satisfaction through Health Center-initiated surveys and from student representatives on the Student Health Advisory Committee.
Because of the growing economic diversity of the student body, we have encountered situations in which domestic and international students have incurred significant medical bills at the local hospital, which struggles financially and thus finds it difficult to absorb the costs. As a result, over the past few years we have paid outstanding medical bills for a small number of students. In addition, we are experiencing a growing number of students who have had little or no health care, particularly dental care, before coming to Williams.
Campus Safety and Security
Campus Safety and Security (CSS) serves the whole campus community. Its primary objective is to maintain the safety of members of the campus community, and to identify, rectify, and report violations of College rules and regulations. Its staff maintain a very active educational role with students. CSS has 25 regular staff (five of them part-time) and ten reserve staff. All officers have completed the New England Campus Security Officer Training Program and are trained as first responders and in the use of automated external defibrillators. Their backgrounds are in law enforcement, security, criminal justice, and the military. CSS offers crime prevention programs to increase awareness of safety and security and uses pamphlets, surveys, personal item inventories, and campus safety alerts. Notable programs include bicycle registration, which allows for identification and return; engraving ID numbers on valuable items; Rape Aggression Defense training; and fire safety education in coordination with the Office of Safety and Environmental Compliance. The Office of the Dean of the College uses CSS as an investigation arm when adjudicating issues of student behavior.
On average, CSS each year takes 32,000 calls, opens approximately 2,800 rooms for students who are locked out, provides approximately 900 transports to and from the Health Center, and provides nearly 1,300 personal safety and money escorts. Patrol miles on campus and nearby streets exceed 68,000 per year.
CSS officers are not special police and have no civil authority. The office maintains a close working relationship with local and state police. The office trains for emergencies using tabletop exercises run by outside consultants and/or by the Director. These drills have included possible weather-related incidents, long-term power outages, and chemical spills.
The Multicultural Center
The Multicultural Center (MCC) supports our educational mission through the lens of diversity. It offers student services and programs in areas such as gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, and religion, and assists students with the transition to college life, provides academic and educational information and advising, enhances student leadership and development, and supports student co-curricular involvement.
Over the last decade, management of the MCC has oscillated between being a member of the administrative staff and a member of the faculty. Underlying these changes were attempts to reinvigorate the MCC and change it from primarily a programming office for student groups to one more closely linked with academic programs. In 2002, we instituted a structure with an Administrative Director and a rotating faculty member who serves as Academic Director. We hope in this way to maintain the important programs the MCC oversees and give a faculty member the responsibility to integrate those programs into the curriculum. So far, two faculty have served in this capacity. It is clear that the focus of the position needs to be better defined, as the two have approached the responsibilities very differently. In addition, a committee of faculty and staff has been working to forge a long-term strategic plan for the MCC. One recent decision has been to switch the MCC Director’s reporting line from the Dean of the College to the Vice President for Strategic Planning and Institutional Diversity.
The MCC welcomes and orients new students to the community through a variety of programs and events (descriptive list in Team Room). It provides many services to multicultural student organizations: meeting space; help in preparing budgets and tracking expenditures; payments to vendors; assistance with planning programs; advocacy; leadership training; and management of information databases. A list of the student organizations, and their increased activities over the years, that the MCC serves (in Team Room) reflects the College’s changing demographics and the value of its support.
Many of these student groups organize programs that celebrate their history, heritage, and identity — from Cinco de Mayo or Chinese Moonfest to the much longer Latino Heritage Month or Queer Pride Days. The events are open to the campus and often to the public. They include guest speakers (including Williams faculty and staff as well as visitors), performers, and films relating to the student-selected theme. Generally, the events are well attended. However, more campus-wide recognition of and participation in them would advance MCC and College goals. Students tend to over-program these events, which drains both student chairs and MCC staff. Although the programs are always rewarding, we have streamlined them (i.e. limited the number of heritage programs to one each year per group) and continue to look for ways to make them successful in attendance, content, and structure.
We have developed new multicultural academic initiatives and educational programming to support the changing Williams community. These efforts take place throughout the year and constantly evolve. Some deeply involve students in their planning and implementation while others are the sole responsibility of MCC staff.
Community Service
As at a number of peer institutions, community service here has experienced noticeable expansion over the past ten years. Though our Berkshire location may seem to set the College apart in splendid bucolic isolation, actually it urges upon our students an invitation to engage in a full spectrum of the issues and concerns of changing times, from urban to rural, from privilege to poverty, from culture to culture.
Surveys of seniors suggest that as many as two-thirds of our students have responded to that invitation by engaging in some form of service in the community by the time they graduate. But their engagement has taken so many different forms, stemmed from so many different motivations, manifested itself on so many occasions — formal and informal, communal and individual, curricular and co-curricular, public and private, daily or weekly or occasionally on a Saturday afternoon whim — that it has been all but impossible to quantify the hours they commit or the mutual benefit to them and to our region.
In the Fall of 2003, we began a concerted four-year expansion of the resources and infrastructure dedicated to coordinating and advising student extra-curricular involvement in the wider community. The presence of a dedicated Americorps*VISTA community organizer, made possible by a grant from Massachusetts Campus Compact, helped us to redirect the mission of our Center for Community Engagement (what had traditionally been called “community service”) from simply facilitating student volunteerism to implementing the central conviction that there are things that many of our students need and want to learn that they cannot learn in a classroom, a laboratory, or a library. Under the potent influence of our VISTA staff person (a recent graduate of a liberal arts college similar to Williams), our culture of civic engagement has changed and blossomed. Student project leaders now receive consistent training and mentoring. New student-initiated programs — recovery and distribution of dining service surplus food, health education and advocacy in local schools, local home-energy conservation and winterization, to name a few — have joined the roster of 30 or more student-led continuing projects. Student tutoring in surrounding school systems has almost doubled. We invite half a dozen students each year to be Summer Community Scholars, working up to eight weeks in regional agencies while reading and reflecting with faculty in related fields. Participation in “alternative spring break” trips has tripled — particularly as a result of Hurricane Katrina. For example, in March 2006, nearly 100 students spent half of their spring break doing relief work in the Gulf region, and several religious groups mobilized an additional two dozen students to spend a week in inner-city neighborhoods in Boston, Lowell, and New York, doing tutoring, community organizing, and soup kitchen work. A new first-year orientation program, called “Where Am I,” enables nearly a quarter of each entering class to spend four of their first days here out in the community, getting acquainted with our neighbors and with regional issues and sharing the work of local agencies.
During 2006-07 we realized the twin goals of creating a permanent, professional staff position to supervise and mentor student civic engagement, and inaugurating spacious new quarters for the Center for Community Engagement in the new student center at the heart of campus. Our new staff member devoted to these efforts works closely with the Coordinator of Experiential Education to ensure that students’ academic and co-curricular experiences in the community will have the kind of educational value that can help them learn to assess a community need or launch a community initiative, build relationships with people who are not peers and do not travel in higher education circles, make sustainable commitments and reflect critically on them, and seriously consider vocations that reach toward the highest ethics of citizenship and humanitarianism. Like many other activities we describe in this chapter, these experiences also contribute to growth in leadership skills among our students.
Residential Life
As part of our strategic planning earlier this decade, the President and Dean of the College asked the student-faculty Committee on Undergraduate Life (CUL) to assess and make recommendations about our student life and residential life programs. This multi-year process resulted in a new residential life program, formation of an Office of Campus Life (OCL) reporting to the Dean of the College, and significant new investments in staffing, infrastructure, and programming. Many of these changes have contributed to diversity within residential units, and thus have been related to our many initiatives on diversity.
At the time the process began, our residential system allowed and indeed fostered a significant amount of separation of students by class year, gender, ethnicity, and athletic participation (see updated graphs from 2005 CUL report — Appendix E). The only organizational principles were, first, that first-year students were housed together in the entry system that has long been one of our hallmarks, and, second, that after their first year students would pick, in groups up to eight, where they would live through a lottery system open first to seniors, then juniors, and then sophomores. The lottery operated every year, and most students changed their residence hall each year. After their first year, students had no lasting affiliation with each other as a residential group because they lived with a somewhat random collection of people (besides their pick group) in a given building for only one year. We called the residence halls “houses” (Dodd House, Perry-Bascom House, etc.), but we had nothing like the cohesive houses found at some other colleges and universities. The campus became organized hierarchically — seniors took what was considered the best housing and so on until sophomores were left with one of our largest and for a while least popular residences, Mission Park. These unwelcome tendencies became especially visible in the 1990s. Students thus were less able to benefit from the experiences of those from other class years; social life was first atomized and then, in reaction, centralized by a student organization called ACE (All Campus Entertainment); some residences became identified with particular student groups, allowing athletic teams and ethnic groups largely to live together; and some residences became virtually single-sex. While we value student autonomy, residential life had deteriorated to the point where the College needed to step in despite some student resistance. That deterioration was best described by the faculty chair of the CUL that first tackled the issue, when he described Williams as a place where we believed in student self-governance, but that in residential life we had a lot of self and no governance.
In 2000, the CUL began the process by interviewing key current and former administrators, student leaders, and members of student-faculty committees; holding multiple open meetings with students and the larger community; surveying our students; conducting field trips to other campuses; and conversing with staff and students at several schools. In the Spring of 2002, the CUL released its report detailing its recommendations (copy in Team Room).
We instituted many of them quickly; others took time to develop. Initial actions on the CUL recommendations can be found in the December 2003 report by the Director of Campus Life to the Board (in Team Room). Most notable were the creation and hiring of staff for the OCL. These were the very first hires at Williams to have residential life, not simply student programming, as their primary responsibility. In essence, we had previously treated housing as a facilities issue, not one of student life, and indeed the primary person students sought out about housing issues was a staff member in Facilities. Members of the Dean’s Office also guided students regarding housing issues, but it was no one’s primary responsibility. In contrast, the OCL now oversees the residential life program, housing, student activities and programming, support of student groups, and the new student center, and coordinates a myriad of student activities with other campus offices.
The CUL report of 2002 made specific recommendations on restructuring residential life to create what was called an Anchor House Affiliation System, in which students would for their final three years be affiliated with one of a number of groups of residences whose social life was anchored by a central house. The Dean of the College, however, chose to delay such a significant change to allow time for the hiring of professional residential life staff and the establishment of a functioning, integrated OCL. The Dean believed that the disintegration of what had been a fairly functional residential system until the early 90s had resulted largely from insufficient College oversight and support of residential life, and that it was critical to have experienced staff in place prior to implementing changes. Among the CUL proposals put in place immediately were the creation of the OCL and hiring of residential life staff, the reduction in the maximum student group pick size from eight to four, a capping at 60 per cent of one gender in each residence hall, and the redefinition of the responsibilities and profiles of student leadership positions in houses.
Another CUL proposal implemented was the renovation of several key residence halls, in particular Mission Park. This almost $6 million project took place over the Summer of 2003. Built in the 1970s, Mission Park holds more than 300 beds. By the end of the century, student perception of it as the least desirable housing on campus was a stumbling block to any movement toward an anchor house system since students disliked the idea of being “doomed” to live there for more than one year. In the past five years, we undertook renovation of a number of other residence halls but none was as significant as the change in Mission Park to improving students’ experiences and opening the door to broader changes in residence life.
The CUL revisited residence life issues in 2004-05, chaired by a faculty member who had been a member of the CUL during the first phase of this work and who is an alumnus — both factors giving him perspective on the history of the issue. That committee’s report (in Team Room) engendered much discussion on campus. Overall, the proposal for what they called The Williams House System was extremely thoughtful and well conceived, but many practical details needed to be resolved before it could be implemented. To that end, the chair continued in that role one more year, and the committee managed to hammer out many details of governance, financial support, programming, infrastructure, room draw, and more (reports of that year’s CUL sub-committees are in the Team Room). With these details in hand, we implemented in 2006-07 what has become known as the Neighborhood System. It organizes our residential campus into four clusters, or neighborhoods, each made up of residences that are geographically close and reasonably comparable in how students perceived their quality. Each first-year entry is affiliated with a neighborhood. At the end of their first year, students can remain members of that neighborhood or choose in groups of up to six to be assigned randomly to one.
Creating housing equity among neighborhoods was difficult given our idiosyncratic housing stock. Originally, the CUL proposed five neighborhoods, but there were concerns about the relatively small population of students in each one, given the plans for programming and given the nature of campus social life, and the five varied in housing quality enough to give pause. The solution turned out to involve reconfiguring our housing of first-years. Moving to the newly renovated Mission Park the half of first-years who lived outside the Frosh Quad (Williams and Sage Halls) enabled a more equitable division of housing among neighborhoods and better geographic proximity within neighborhoods. The transition of Mission Park from sophomore to first-year housing brought the added benefit of centering first-year life in the heart of campus. Those in the Frosh Quad now eat primarily in the Mission Dining Hall, returning to the first-year class a sense of social and physical community that had been missing for many years.
We have only one year’s experience of this system, which does not allow thorough analysis, but we can make some observations. Moving first-years to Mission has been quite successful. The new configuration of Mission, with large common spaces and other social spaces, has facilitated community within entry life. In addition, the nature of Mission allows easy movement between entries, and as a result the sense of community within the class is enhanced. Clearly, we have made great progress in reducing the balkanization of the previous system. In 2006-07, only ten per cent of upper-class students lived in houses in which more than 80 per cent of residents were from a single class-year, compared with 60 per cent in 2005-06. At the same time, we have reduced by half (to only 10 per cent) the share of upper-class students living in a house in which more than 80 per cent of residents are white. We have been less successful so far in spreading athletes across campus, but given the high percentage of our students who are athletes, it may take more iterations of the new system to see an effect.
In the first year of the new system there were more events and a greater variety of events as a wider population of students took responsibility for creating and hosting the events that make up the core of social life at a small college. Student leadership positions in neighborhoods are more meaningful than such positions were in the “houses” of the previous system. For instance, in 2006-07 the student leadership of one neighborhood organized an extensive series of events that dovetailed with events organized by other groups on campus to result in a special "Diversity Month."
While not strictly part of our residential life initiative, the new student center already plays a big role in our sense of community. Since it opened in February 2007, students have expressed how important the space has become to their social lives. In addition, it lends itself well to large events that attract a wide cross-section of the student community. Such events often involve various programs run simultaneously in different parts of the building, so students can gravitate to where they are most interested. We designed the center to give students a place to go, to socialize, and to decompress from the pressures of college life. Our sense is that this goal has been realized.
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Overall, we have effected changes to the makeup of the student body, to the ways in which we support their learning, and to the systems by which they educate each other outside the classroom. By objective and subjective measures, most of these changes are off to strong starts. Still working to hit its stride is the new residential life system. This is so in part because of the magnitude of change involved and in part because of the feeling among a significant number of current students of the loss of being able to choose housing anywhere on campus. One year has been insufficient time to develop all the benefits of the new system (community-building, getting to know more students from other class years, more event programming, more interaction with faculty outside one’s major) that should outweigh the cost represented by the less widespread choice of housing. It is clear, however, that more development of the neighborhood system is required. This includes bringing the quality of housing in the Dodd neighborhood in line with that of the other three, building more neighborhood identity, and integrating faculty and staff more fully into neighborhood life. While the rule of thumb among campus life professionals nationally is that any large change in residential life typically takes seven years to become fully established, we are dedicated to making the adaptations to the neighborhood system needed for students to reap its benefits.
The change with the widest impact has been in the makeup of our student body. Greater socio-economic diversity will require us to develop more fully our support services for the students who arrive here with less secondary school preparation and who face greater financial pressures. At the same time these students enhance the educational value of the education that takes place here inside and outside the classroom, particularly in our residential life system.
It will be important for us to continue to assess the effectiveness of these changes in our programs, especially for our newer students, and to alter those programs as necessary to ensure the strongest possible educational experience. The payoffs from major investments in housing renovations, and from adding professional staff in support of campus life, illustrate the necessity — and our willingness — to allocate sufficient resources in order to implement plans. We are committed to continuing improvement in the areas discussed in this chapter. We expect to be able to accomplish that by planning effectively and by allocating the resources necessary to implement our plans.
Projections: On the admission and financial-aid fronts, we anticipate continued progress in our multiple initiatives to increase the low-income applicant pool and we will monitor their success very closely. Admission and financial-aid policy is fundamental to achieving our broad goal of increasing diversity. On advising, we expect three recent changes to have good results. First, we have strengthened our peer tutoring programs. Second, our evaluation of the advising of students about the quantitative or formal reasoning requirement confirmed the value of that advising, and we expect the addition of faculty resources to the process to make it even more effective. Third, we expect the addition of professional staff to mentor students’ civic engagement, along with attractive new quarters for the Center for Community Engagement, to contribute to multiple objectives, including service to our community and region, experiential education, and the development of students’ leadership skills. Of course we will be assessing the success of all these advising efforts on a more or less continuous basis.
Our new residential life system took several years to design, and undoubtedly it will take several years to implement fully. We know that more development of the neighborhood system is required, and we will devote energy, professional expertise, and financial resources to the task. Our student leaders will also help us greatly in this, as the neighborhood system creates opportunities for student leadership. We will always be aware that increased student-faculty interaction was a major goal of the new system, and also aware that such interaction improves student learning (see our discussion in Chapter 4 on assessment of learning) as well as student social life.
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