We’re sad and angered to report that this morning a student noticed the word “fag” marked into the outside of his room door in Brooks House. It looks as if it might have been done with a fingernail.

It’s not known how long ago this took place. Another Brooks resident says that she saw it about a week ago, but, since it looked to be old, hadn’t reported it.

The college immediately notified the Williamstown Police Department, which has visited and photographed the scene, and is proceeding with an investigation. The Dean’s Office and Campus Safety and Security are also investigating, in order to identify and hold accountable whoever is responsible.

Anyone with knowledge that might help this process can contact Williamstown Police at 458-5646 or CSS at 597-4444 or through the anonymous tip site.

This kind of behavior is contrary to everything that we at Williams stand for. Actions that target individuals and groups are not only appalling in and of themselves, they have a corrosive effect on our entire community. And now, in particular, we stand firmly in solidarity with the students, faculty, and staff who’ve worked to organize Queer Pride Month activities on campus to the benefit of us all.

Support for students affected by this is available through the Dean’s Office, Multicultural Center, and Counseling Services. Deans and counselors on call can be reached through CSS at 597-4444 at any time.

We’re in conversation with members of the QSU Steering Committee and other student leaders on ways for us as a community to respond. All who wish to gather for support and a first conversation about community response are welcome tonight at 8 p.m. in Hardy House living room.

Sincerely,

Adam Falk
President

Sarah Bolton
Dean of the College

Mike Reed
V.P. for Strategic Planning and Institutional Diversity

Steve Klass
V.P. for Campus Life

I want to raise the visibility on campus of a national problem that’s also very much present at Williams: sexual assault. Its prevalence and impact are often misunderstood, and the subject can be difficult to discuss. But one of the most important tools in combating sexual assault is knowledge, and so it’s urgent that we do talk about it.

Resources for reporting sexual assault and for seeking support are listed later in this letter, but I’ll start with some context.

National surveys report that one in five women, and one in sixteen men, are sexually assaulted while in college. These appalling numbers are quite consistent across types of institutions, from small liberal arts colleges to large universities. Sadly, we have no reason to believe that Williams differs. In surveys conducted at Williams last year, 19 percent of our female students and 4 percent of our male students reported sexual touching without their consent over the previous twelve months. Some 0.3 percent of our men and 4 percent of our women reported sexual penetration without their consent – rape – in the previous 12 months. (These rates are similar to, and in some cases somewhat higher than, those of our peer schools who fielded the same survey.)

Sexual assaults profoundly affect students in every part of their experience at college – academically, socially, and in the community. And, of course, those effects often continue well beyond their college years.

The fact that sexual assaults affect so many students at Williams – hundreds each year – is completely unacceptable. Rape and other forms of sexual assault are personal violations that are often life-changing, and we must do everything in our power to reduce, and ultimately eliminate, them here.

The ongoing effort to improve sexual assault response and prevention has gained significant momentum at Williams over the past year. Last fall, Vice President Mike Reed created a task force – the members of which included Campus Safety, Health Services, the Dean’s Office, Athletics, the Multicultural Center, and student leaders – to discuss our current approaches and how they should be improved. As a result, we’re working to advance our practices around response, support, investigation, prevention, and awareness. The efforts of the task force are urgent and ongoing, and deeply involve all branches of student services.

One crucial aspect of prevention is holding perpetrators accountable through effective investigations and appropriate disciplinary sanctions. Nationally, and at Williams, the great difficulties that survivors face in reporting an assault, while at the same time processing their trauma, result in most sexual assaults going unreported. To help reduce barriers to reporting, we’re improving our support for survivors before, during, and after the process of reporting and investigation.

Let me be clear – sexual assault cannot be tolerated at Williams. The Williams Code of Conduct (http://dean.williams.edu/?page_id=1762 ) forbids sexual assault as defined in Massachusetts law and in our own community standards. Those found to have committed sexual assault have been suspended or expelled from the college. (There have been four such cases over the past year.) In the future, we’ll continue to require that those who commit these violations be separated from the college.

Other keys to prevention are education and awareness. Although discussions of sexual assault currently take place several times each year – from JA and Baxter Fellow training to First Days, Claiming Williams, entry talks, and Take Back the Night – we need to do much more to create a campus culture that is attentive to the possibility of assault and to the necessity of intervening to stop it. Dean Sarah Bolton, Vice President Steve Klass, Mike Reed, and their teams are collaborating with students to move this crucial work forward.

My appreciation goes to all of the students, staff, and faculty who are working with us to end sexual assault at Williams. My particular thanks go to the students in the Rape and Sexual Assault Network, and to Director of Health Services Ruth Harrison and Health Educator Donna Denelli-Hess, who’ve worked tirelessly and effectively on these issues for many years.

There’s a great deal to do, but it’s urgent that we do it. You’ll hear from me again about the status of this work before the end of the spring term.

Sincerely,
Adam Falk
President

Resources for students who’ve experienced sexual assault or are concerned about a friend who’s been assaulted:

Sexual Assault Survivor Services – Expert Williams Health Services staff available 24/7 for support and guidance. (413) 441-6783.

Rape and Sexual Assault Network – Students with training in supporting those who have experience sexual violence. (413) 597-4100

Elizabeth Freeman Center – An off campus resource for survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence. (413) 499-2425

All student services staff (Health Services, Multicultural Center, Dean’s Office, Campus Safety, Student Life, Chaplains) are trained to support survivors and connect them to further resources.

For more information on what happens when you report an assault, and on contacting Williams resources and/or the police, see http://dean.williams.edu/?page_id=1762 .

One of the few remaining mysteries for me at Williams is why this is called Dead Week. Everyone I know is bustling to get ready to start the Spring Semester, the name of which, as I look out the window, is also mysterious.

The most focused activity of all is in final preparation for the centerpiece of Claiming Williams—the schedule of activities that have been creatively put together and that are listed here. Thursday’s events address a wide variety of visions for our changing community, and I urge each of you–students, faculty and staff–to come listen and add your own important voice. We know from last fall’s horrible act in Prospect, and perhaps even more from the discussions about other incidents of bias and discrimination on campus that arose in subsequent public dialogues, that such work has never been more urgent or important. This year’s Claiming Williams Day has the added advantage of dovetailing with the efforts of Students Against Silence, whose participants have organized themselves over Winter Study, and of the faculty-student-staff task force developing a protocol for college responses to bias-related incidents, which has begun to meet.

Our thanks go to those who planned this year’s Williams Reads program. Alison Bechdel’s graphic autobiography Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic was both challenging and endearing, and it inspired engaging conversations across campus. This annual event has grown into a wonderful new Williams tradition.

It’s worth taking a moment to acknowledge some exciting milestones the college has reached in recent months. These include the completion of Chapin Hall’s renovation and the progress made on building our new library. Chapin is ready for use. It’s now much more accessible throughout; is protected by a sprinkler system; and its sound, light, and temperature can be better controlled. And all of this was accomplished while protecting the aesthetics of that beautiful room. It’s great to be able to gather the community there once again.

Over at the new library site, that deafening sound you hear is the silence of no more hammering at ledge. There’ll be a little more now and then, but nothing like the Excedrin-selling experience of the fall. Thank you to all for your patience with that considerable disruption. I love seeing the walls now starting to go up.

I continue to be convinced, however, that the most exciting things that happen at Williams occur behind the doors of our classrooms. As one emblem of that magic, I’d point out that yet another faculty member recently received the highest national award in her field when the Mathematical Association of America declared Susan Loepp a winner of its Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching. In becoming the fifth Williams mathematician to win this award since 1993 (the others being Frank Morgan, Colin Adams, Ed Burger, and Tom Garrity), Susan represents phenomenal teaching not only in her own department but across the college.

So do the faculty who participated last semester in the second installment of Williams Thinking. Short, TED-like talks by Magnus Bernhardsson, Sandra Burton, and Tom Garrity have been added to the site. Three more faculty will be taped March 12, if you want to mark your calendar. I’m pleased to be able to point people outside of Williamstown, especially alumni and prospective students, to where they can experience some of the remarkable teaching that takes place here.

In addition to the intellectual, arts, and athletic events already on the calendar, there’s a special opportunity that we’ll all have in early March. That’s when the Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State will culminate the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of its Foreign Relations Series by co-sponsoring with our Political Science Department a conference here to explore major themes in national security policy from 1969 to 1972, and in particular the SALT I Treaty. Keep an eye out for details.

At this time of year, the college also moves through its budget-setting process. As we do so, the world’s financial markets remain turbulent. The closest thing to a consensus among market analysts is that this volatility will continue for the foreseeable future. The college remains financially strong by national standards, but this uncertainty means we’ll need to continue to budget very carefully. Growth in our resources is likely to be slow, so we’ll do well to continue focusing them on our highest priorities, which remain the education, health, and safety of our students.

Meanwhile, I hope that we all are ready to embrace, separately and together, the many opportunities that the new semester holds.

Regards,
Adam Falk
President

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 directions to fuller coverage, appear in Scene & Herd.

As the investigation into that incident continues, the college is engaged in serious conversations about larger campus issues and social challenges, having learned more fully in the wake of this one act the extent to which instances of discrimination happen here, as they do everywhere.

We have seen a powerful and thoughtful response among a broad cross-section of students, faculty, staff, alumni and parents, and I’ve benefited from the resulting deeper sense of the college’s cultural evolution over the past half century.

We at Williams expect a great deal from each other and from this place, and we do not shirk from holding ourselves to higher standards than we see in our society at large. When our expectations aren’t met, it rightfully upsets us. We know racism exists in America, and we know race is an issue that’s too rarely talked about honestly and productively. But that’s not what we want for Williams. Our aim, as I said in my remarks at an all-campus forum Nov. 14, is a Williams community that is free of racism, free of sexism, free of homophobia, free of fear. There’s nothing we can aspire to that is more important to who we are and to what Williams is.

The idea, of course, is not only to create that community on campus but also to foster in all of our students the sense that they can then go out into the world and make it a better place. That is how Williams, over time and over generations, brings change to society as a whole. I’m confident that by harnessing our currently heightened energy we’ll effect a more rapid evolution of our college culture toward the day when the slights and injustices we’ve learned about recently are things of the past.

The work of fully realizing the community we aspire to is urgent, but for all our commitment, history teaches us that the realization of our goals will be neither quick nor easy.

Our college’s evolution, especially over the last half-century, has been defined in large part by this kind of community-driven leadership. In fact, today’s Williams was shaped tremendously by a string of fundamental and farsighted college decisions over several years, beginning in the early 1960s, that led Williams to:

• increase in size by 50 percent
• begin to admit women and to diversify the student body by race, ethnicity and religion
• overhaul the curriculum and
• move from a fraternity-based to a house-based system of residential life.

We intend to celebrate these 50-year anniversaries, as befits a college, with scrutiny and analysis.

We’ve begun by asking historian Michael Beschloss ’77 to interview President Emeritus John Chandler, who as dean of the faculty and then as a Williams board member was a central eyewitness to these times. Their conversation (beginning on 
p. 12) focuses on the leadership style of Jack Sawyer, who served as president during those years.

It’s clear, though, that changes of this size were not the work of one person; many people and factors played roles. Over the next few years we’ll have conversations on campus and in these pages that explore the broader social context, the campus dynamic and the individual people and processes that came to bear.

Understanding more deeply these important parts of our past will inform the essential work we do together now to help Williams continually evolve to meet the future.

I am delighted to announce that, following a national search, the new Director of the Williams College Museum of Art will be Christina Olsen, Director of Education and Public Programs at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon.

Her commitment to and experience with the educational mission of museums make her a great fit for WCMA.

Before moving to Portland, she worked for 11 years at the Getty Museum and Foundation, where among other responsibilities she managed the foundation’s $4 million grants for institutional research and education. The Getty, which until recently was under the leadership of Jim Wood ’63, is a place where the future of museums is being worked out, and Tina participated deeply in that process.

The college will benefit from her energy, openness, and passion both for art objects and for how people interact with them.

A fuller story of her extensive career is told in the news release available here. http://bit.ly/xGPtfX

Tina begins her new position May 1. She’ll then be joined at the end of the school year by her husband Jeff Glab and their daughters Sonia, 10, and Alice, 8.

Our thanks go to Interim Director Katy Kline, who has agreed to continue her thoughtful stewardship of the museum until Tina can be here.

We should also thank the Search Committee, members of which are listed below, for their careful work, which has lead to this wonderful result.

Regards,
Adam Falk
President

WCMA Director Search Committee
George Ahl ’82, Chair of the WCMA Visiting Committee
Laylah Ali ’90, Professor of Art
Magnus Bernhardsson, Professor of History
Will Dudley ’89 (Chair) Provost and Professor of Philosophy
Marc Gotlieb, Professor of Art and Director of the Graduate Program in Art History
Maya Harakawa ’12
Keli Kaegi, Assistant to the President and Secretary of the College
Katy Kline, Interim Director of the Williams College Museum of Art
Peter Low, Chair and Professor of Art
Glenn Lowry ’76, Director of the Museum of Modern Art
Betty Zimmerberg, Chair and Professor of Psychology

I am happy to announce the formation of the Williams Staff Committee, an elected body that will seek to increase the visibility of staff on campus and to advance their role in the life of the college.

The group will provide suggestions and input to the senior administration and to the broader college community and will contribute to the richness of our community and to the college’s mission of providing the finest possible liberal arts education.

The description pasted below spells out how the group will work and the guidelines put in place to ensure that its members are representative of our wonderful and diverse staff.

This committee does not replace the longstanding Staff Advisory Council, which will continue to consult with Human Resources on issues of importance to staff, including feedback on institutional policies and practices.

Formation of this new committee grows out of discussion among various groups on campus, especially the Committee on Diversity and Community, and draws on models at some similar colleges.

I’m asking an ad hoc committee to focus on soliciting nominations and on determining the voting procedures for election to the WSC. It’s members are:

Lisa Briggs, Dining
Kelly Kervan, Controller’s Office
Tom Mahar, Facilities
Pat Malanga, English
Christine Menard, Library
Trevor Murphy, OIT
Geraldine Shen, College Relations
Suzanne Silitch, Communications
Rick Spalding, Chaplain

I thank them for their willingness to serve.

I look forward to the beginning of their work early in the new year and to having the WSC in place, with its potential to enrich our campus community by developing ways to draw staff more centrally into its life.

Regards,
Adam Falk
President

Williams Staff Committee

An elected body, the Williams Staff Committee (WSC) seeks to increase the visibility of staff on campus and to advance their role in the life of the college. WSC provides suggestions and input to the senior administration and the broader college community, contributes to the richness of our community and to the college’s mission of providing the finest possible liberal arts education.

The committee:

Brings ideas from the staff to senior administrators and serves in return as a group that the senior administration may consult for staff input on college issues, excluding terms and conditions of staff employment,
Provides open and direct communication within the staff community,
Advises, as appropriate, on staff members who will sit on other standing and ad hoc committees that address issues that relate to matters of interest to staff,
Identifies other ways for staff to engage with each other, with students, and with faculty in an effort to promote community and to make the staff community a more visible and recognized part of the wider college community.

Guidelines:

WSC is elected by all eligible staff members* (exempt and non-exempt) from self- and other nominations solicited from all staff.
WSC is composed of 11 exempt and non-exempt staff members, in proportion to their representative numbers (currently four exempt and seven non-exempt).
WSC must have at least one non-exempt member from dining services and at least one non-exempt member from facilities.
No more than two members from any department or office may serve concurrently.
In consultation with WSC, the president appoints one ex officio non-voting member from human resources, below the level of director.
Members serve two-year terms, with five members of WSC being replaced one year and six the next.
Meetings are held monthly, with additional subcommittee meetings as needed.
Each year, WSC elects from among its voting members a chair, who develops meeting agendas, in consultation with the members of WSC.
All votes are made by secret ballot unless WSC agrees unanimously otherwise.
WSC membership, with contact information, appointments to subcommittees or other college committees, and meeting notes are posted in a timely manner on the WSC website.
Members’ time to attend WSC meetings during work hours, as well as meetings of other committees they have been appointed to is considered by the college to be work time.
WSC receives administrative support from the Office of the Vice President for Finance & Administration.
It is expressly understood that WSC is not a recognized labor organization for the purposes of collective bargaining with the college over terms and conditions of employment.

* Eligible members exclude the President, the Provost, the Deans of the College and of the Faculty, the Vice Presidents for Finance & Administration, Campus Life, Strategic Planning & Institutional Diversity, and College Relations, the Chief Investment Officer, the Assistant to the President for Public Affairs, and the Secretary of the College.

Establishment of the initial Williams Staff Committee:

The president will appoint an ad hoc committee, composed of a diverse group of staff, to organize the election of the first WSC. The ad hoc committee will solicit nominations from all offices and departments, and will determine voting procedures (presumably modeled on those for faculty elections). The first WSC will be composed of five members serving three-year terms and six members serving two-year terms, to establish the two-year rotation described above.

In the wake of such a powerfully moving day for me personally and for the college, I want to express appreciation to all involved.

Thank you if you helped push for the cancelation of classes and practices so that we could take a moment to reflect together.

Thank you for the courage it took for so many of you to stand before a crowd of people and tell your heartfelt, often painful, story, and for all who made the commitment to march, to attend, and to listen.

Thank you to the many staff and faculty who helped support students and each other at this challenging moment and who, often behind the scenes, made the logistics work.

And thank you for the energy to continue these conversations, to generate ideas, and to take action toward making this a campus on which such painful stories are a thing of the past. The main lesson of recent days is not just the importance but the urgency of that work.

We will continue the effort to find and hold accountable the perpetrator(s) of last weekend’s crime. And, as was said by so many yesterday so eloquently, all of us who care about this college must strive to hold ourselves accountable for the quality of our community.

With a heart full of gratitude, I look forward to doing this work with you.

Warm regards,
Adam Falk
President

We want to report to you the full facts of what took place early Saturday morning. What follows here is very disturbing.

On Saturday at around 12:30 a.m. a student called Campus Safety and Security to report seeing scrawled on a hallway wall on the fourth floor of Prospect Hall the phrase “All Niggers Must Die.” We are horrified by this act and regret needing to repeat such language in a college communication.

CSS launched a college investigation and notified Williamstown Police.

The initial e-mail report to campus went out around 10 a.m. We apologize for the fact that not only what occurred, but our initial report itself, have made a significant number of campus community members feel unsafe.

Dean Sarah Bolton invited a range of student leaders to meet with her and Vice President Mike Reed that evening. We estimate that about 70 students took part. As the evening went on, they were joined by several faculty and staff, including President Adam Falk and Vice President Steve Klass. At one point in the evening, a group of students and others marched to the Williamstown Police Station to encourage the town’s investigation of this hate crime.

Those of us at Saturday evening’s meeting came away with a much deeper understanding of the sense of vulnerability that many members of our campus community live with each day and how it has been made worse by this hate speech and the initial report.

Today at 12:30 p.m. some 200 students, faculty, and staff met in Goodrich to continue the conversation, including a discussion of possible college responses.

We can report that, given the gravity of the situation, those responses include the following:

CSS and the Dean’s Office will continue their investigation into who is responsible for this incident. So far they have talked with everyone who lives in Prospect and everyone who based on card swipes was in the building at the time. A great deal of harm has been done by this vile act. Since there is no excuse for behavior so offensive, hateful, and harmful—anywhere, but especially at Williams—we will continue to do all that we can to hold the perpetrator(s) accountable.

After consulting with the Faculty Steering Committee, we have decided to cancel all classes and athletic practices tomorrow (Monday). We understand how this disrupts important college functions, but in the wake of a shock such as this, the campus community needs to take a pause. An event that we expect all available students, faculty, and staff to attend will take place at 11 a.m. on Chapin Lawn. Details of that will be sent later. We also hope that all those attending will be able to find ways to have lunch together in small groups. To facilitate that, card swipes will not be required for Monday lunch.

Several spaces on campus will be set aside and staffed for those who would like to continue important discussions about these matters. Details on this to follow.

Members of the Counseling Center (x2353), Dean’s Office (x4171), Multicultural Center (x3340), and Chaplains’ Office (x2483) are available for students who would benefit from their support. Anyone wishing to meet with the Counseling Center should call CSS (x4444), who will contact a counselor to arrange for a phone or on-campus consultation. We will report later on extended hours and places at which counselors will be available.

For any students who feel physically unsafe, please contact CSS (x4444), which will contact the Dean’s Office.

The college is forming a committee to produce a protocol for the handling and reporting of any future such incidents.

We encourage faculty, but all of us really, to appreciate that what has occurred here has affected a large number of students so deeply that it will be difficult for them to function normally for some time. We urge sensitivity to their situations.

We also encourage everyone to take care of those you are with tonight.

As we together organize our individual, group, and college-wide responses, may that be with outrage at what has occurred and at what too many members of the campus community are continually burdened by, along with the resolute sense that in the end we will succeed in making this campus, nation, and world a place that is safe for all.

Sincerely,

Adam Falk
President

Sarah Bolton
Dean of the College

Steve Klass
V.P. for Campus Life

Mike Reed
V.P. for Strategic Planning and Institutional Diversity

It’s hard to think about winter after the run of summerlike weather we’ve just had, but I’d like to do that for a minute.

Many of you know that for the past three years the college experimented with closing virtually the whole campus over Winter Break. The original thought, I’m told, was that we might considerably lower utility costs and greenhouse gas emissions, and reap the welcome byproduct of extending by four days the Winter Break for staff.

The college learned several things over those three years. The effect on utility use and emissions was real but not large, some faculty were burdened by not having (heated) access to their offices and labs, and staff found the added days off a boon.

Experiments are useful even when the result differs from what you expected, so the design going forward is to think of this as Staff Winter Break. Adding these days off for staff will keep us roughly in line with our peers, and they come at a time when it can be hard to get some kinds of work done because many staff colleagues have taken vacation. Faculty office buildings will remain open and heated. And the happy byproduct will now be the still somewhat lower than before levels of utility use and gas emissions.

Since this year’s staff holidays fall on December 23 and 26 and January 2, the Staff Winter Break will be December 27-30. Staff who must work December 27-30 will get time off, to be scheduled with their supervisors.

To make the break as full as possible for staff, all offices and departments are asked to let as many staff as they can be away on these days. As a result, Sawyer Library and the indoor athletics facilities will be closed. Fayerweather Hall will be open for approved international students through a system organized by the Dean’s Office and the Office of Student Life. Information on that is at http://bit.ly/ndxwmK/.

Another thing we’ve learned over the past few breaks is how to manage our buildings more efficiently year-round, which has been useful.

Our thanks go to all those who have helped to manage and then to analyze these experiments, all those who were inconvenienced by the old model, and to all staff, whose dedication to Williams we’re happy to acknowledge in this added way.

Regards,
Adam Falk
President

I am delighted to announce that Kathryn R. Kent, professor of English, has accepted the invitation to direct the Williams-Exeter Programme at Oxford University for two years beginning July 1, 2012.  

Katie has been a member of the English Department since 1997 and has served to great effect as chair of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. Her areas of expertise include U.S. women’s literature, queer theory, and cultural studies. She’s a natural fit for this position as she already has scholarly connections at Oxford. As a member of the Class of 1988, she was actually one of the programme’s pioneers. She knows firsthand how our students will experience the cultural transitions from the U.S. to the U.K., from the Berkshires to Oxford city, and from small college to big university.     

As director, she’ll be the primary academic and personal advisor for the 26 juniors admitted to the program each year. She’ll hold the title of tutor for visiting students at Exeter College and will work with Exeter fellows and other Oxford instructors to arrange our students’ tutorials. Together with her family, Katie will live in the director’s residence, which is immediately adjacent to Ephraim Williams House, where the students live.  

She will succeed Nancy Roseman, professor of biology, who has served in this role since July 2010. Thanks from all of us go to Katie and Nancy for their willingness to serve the college in this capacity.

Regards,
Adam Falk
President