7 May 2008

To: The Williams College Faculty

From: Robert Jackall, Co-director, Williams in New York

Re: Response to the Williams in New York Review Committee Report

At the May 2001 faculty meeting, the Williams College faculty voted to establish an Experiential Education Initiative with the Williams in New York Program (WNY) at its core. Sixty-seven (67) percent of Williams faculty approved the initiative. Voting was by written ballot and included absentee ballots cast by faculty who could not attend the meeting.

A pilot WNY program began in fall 2005, followed by pilot programs in the semesters of fall 2006, spring 2007, fall 2007, and spring 2008. A total of 38 Williams students have participated in these five pilot semesters. See Appendix 1 for the list of participating students.

In summer 2007, the Dean of Faculty constituted a Williams in New York Review Committee, chaired by Professor Chris Waters, to evaluate the WNY program and make recommendations to the faculty about its future. You recently received a report from that committee. Six committee members oppose the continuance of the program. Three committee members support its continuance in modified form, backed by the College’s resources.

The committee has framed a proposition for the 7 May 2008 faculty meeting so that:

A YES vote TERMINATES the WNY program

A NO vote CONTINUES the WNY program, requiring the College to take all necessary steps to “modify the Williams in New York program to promote its viability”.

I urge colleagues to vote NO on the review committee’s proposition.

The following summary presents the three most important reasons for a NO vote. (See pages 2-5)

More detailed notes on the report appear on pages 5-9. Appendices (numbered 1-5 in Arabic numerals) begin on page 10.

Summary arguments to support a NO vote

1. The review committee proposes that the faculty vote on the fate of the Williams in New York program on the basis of inadequate information. Specifically:

The committee misstates and misrepresents the data on which it reached its conclusions about the issue of participants’ assessment of the educational value of the program. Appendix One of the review committee’s report states that the committee employed the following documents in assessing the program:

“Finally, documents pertaining to students included summaries of the interviews undertaken each semester (both pre-enrollment and post-enrollment) by John Gerry (Associate Dean of the Faculty) and/or Paula Consolini (Coordinator of Experiential Education), a written summary of the two interviews undertaken by the committee chair in May 2007 with students accepted to study in New York in the Fall of 2007, and thoughtful, written testimonials provided by more than three quarters of all the students ever enrolled in the Program in response to the committee chair’s request for personal reflections about the Program from all former WNY students.” See Appendix 4 for Professor Waters’s letter soliciting student materials.

But the committee did not interview any of the 16 students in the fall 2007 and spring 2008 WNY program after they completed their semesters nor did it receive “written testimonials” from them. These 16 students comprise 42 percent of all students who have participated thus far in the program [16/38]. See Appendix 5 for an e-signed statement from these 16 students in the fall 2007 and spring 2008 editions of WNY. These students state:

“We were not interviewed about our WNY experiences by anyone on the WNY Review Committee AFTER our semesters ended, nor did we receive from anyone on the Committee any request for ‘written testimonials’ about our experiences AFTER our semesters in the program.”

E-signed by:

FALL 2007 SPRING 2008Melissa Barton ‘09 Sarah Cobb ‘09Nichole Beiner ‘09 Caitlin Colesanti ‘09Lauren Bloch ‘09 Anouk Dey ‘09Emily Fowler-Cornfeld ‘09 Claire Gallagher ‘09Craig Hand ‘09 Maya Lama ‘09Elizabeth Kantack ‘09 Morgan Phillips-Spotts ‘09Rebekkah Marrs ‘09 Andana Streng ‘09Nichole McNeil ‘09 Sophia Torres ‘09

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That is:

The committee did not have: “thoughtful, written testimonials” from “more than three quarters of all the students ever enrolled in the Program in response to the committee chair’s request. . . .” In fact, only 22 WNY students ever received requests for “written testimonials,” and all of those participated in fall 2005, fall 2006, and spring 2007.

According to the review committee’s own report (see above), Professor Waters interviewed only two students from the fall 2007 semester and these interviews came before they experienced the program.

Thus, the entire third year of the pilot program – a full 40 percent of the program to date (two of five semesters)-- remains unevaluated, except for SCS scores, brief pre-participation interviews conducted by the associate dean of faculty and the director of experiential education, and the two interviews conducted by the chairman of the review committee. It is particularly difficult to understand why the eight students from fall 2007, all of whom have been on campus for all of spring 2008, were not interviewed.

Moreover, from the perspectives of students participating in the fall 2005, fall 2006, and spring 2007 WNY semesters, the interviews conducted by the associate dean of faculty and the director of experiential education focused almost entirely on housekeeping issues (issues about running an educational program in a working hotel) and students’ adjustment to New York City and not on students’ views of the educational value of the WNY program.

In addition:

The committee did not interview the non-Williams adjunct professors in the program, some of whom the report criticizes sharply, to get their perspectives on their courses, their successes, and their failings

The committee did not interview or solicit materials from any of the organizational partners in New York City who are enthusiastic participants in the program and sponsors of our students’ fieldwork sites.

The committee did not interview or solicit materials from any of the alumni and alumnae who participated actively in the program except for the five students who participated in the WSP 2004 prototype WNY program. See Appendix 2 for s list of all the alumni and alumnae who have participated in some way in the various editions of WNY.

All of these materials are important for any rational decision by the Williams faculty about the quality and feasibility of the Williams in New York program.

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2. The review committee misstates the costs of the WNY program to date.

The committee conflates anticipated tuition costs to NYU in 2008-2009 with costs sustained in all five semesters of the program to date. The affiliation with NYU begins only in fall 2008.

The committee does not provide sufficient comparative data to allow faculty to assess the relative cost of the WNY program with the Williams programs at Oxford or Mystic. Nor does it provide a comparative estimate of the relative cost of the WNY program with the subsidies per student provided by the College to cover the difference between full tuition and the “real cost” of a Williams education.

3. Most importantly, the review committee underestimates the talents, creativity, and ingenuity of Williams faculty members to sustain the Williams in New York program in the future.

Fieldwork is a singular way for Williams students to integrate liberal-arts learning with work in the world. Beyond the committee’s narrow construction of the program’s signature emphasis on fieldwork by identifying it solely with sociology, fieldwork is in fact a primary methodology throughout the tripartite division of the Williams curriculum. The committee does not take into account the extraordinary range of fieldwork possibilities that Williams faculty members from different disciplines could bring to the WNY program. For example, one need only reference:

Art History E.J. Johnson Fieldwork Studying Architecture in Renaissance Italy

Astronomy J. Pasachoff: Field Trips to Study Astronomical Events

BiologyH. Art – Ecological Fieldwork in Hopkins Forest

J. Edwards + D. Smith – Fieldwork on Isle of Royale

Political Science

M. MacDonald: Fieldwork in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and IsraelNgoni Munemo: Fieldwork in Botswana and Zimbabwe

History Kenda Mutongi: Fieldwork in Kenya

Religion B. Darrow: Fieldwork in Jordan, Egypt, Mongolia, and Tajikistan

This is not to mention the College’s long and wonderful tradition in other kinds of fieldwork, to wit: Amos Eaton’s fieldwork in botany in 1817-1818 or the fantastic history of the Lyceum of Natural History, which took Williams students to the Bay of Fundy (1835), Newfoundland (1855), Florida (1857), Labrador and Greenland (1860), South America (1867), and Honduras (1871). One could also mention the 1986 WSP expedition

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to Amelia Island, Florida, where a band of 16 Williams students discovered and excavated the re-buried remains of 33 Native Americans.

The task in creating the WNY program was to concretize the notion of experiential education in a thoroughly intellectual way. Thus, WNY explicitly eschews certain extant notions of experiential education, specifically: pre-vocational internships, service learning, and advocacy learning. Fieldwork encourages Williams students to learn how to observe the world with their own eyes, ears, and disciplined sensibilities, and how to establish and internalize their own criteria for assessing the reliability and validity of what they observe, hear, and see.

Futher notes on the review committee’s report

1. The review committee’s praise for the program. The first part of the committee’s report praises the pilot WNY program for its implementation of the faculty’s May 2001 mandate to create a thoroughly intellectual experiential education program. The committee acknowledges that the WNY program also creates a venue to: overcome the College’s rural isolation; offer opportunities for our students to study in one of the most diverse cities in the world; and introduce students to the rich cultural life of a major metropolis. The committee also recognizes the enormous value of the Williams Club as a locus for the program, situated as it is in the very heart of Manhattan. The committee briefly characterizes WNY’s pedagogical goals. See Appendix 3 for the full statement of WNY’s pedagogical goals.

2. On the issue of faculty to staff the program. The report states “faculty interest in directing the Program appears not to be very high.” Exactly how many faculty members have expressed interest in directing the Williams in New York program?

The committee’s report provides no numbers in this regard. But it is important for the faculty to know not only how many but which faculty members and disciplines have expressed interest in directing the program. It is also important here to take into account the marginal and difficult circumstances under which the program has been operating to date. Were the program to be well established with the College’s full imprimatur, the number of faculty interested in directing it would undoubtedly increase.

3.On the “lack of curricular coherence.” The WNY pilot program is the main component of the Williams faculty’s May 2001 institution of an experiential education component of the College’s curriculum. To this end, the various curricula of the program in each pilot semester have emphasized components of experiential teaching and learning. These include:

Fieldwork in mainstream institutions, accompanied by tutorials Courses that take students to remote corners of the city where they meet a wide variety of

men and women engaged in public affairs

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Courses where students interview men and women of affairs in a seminar context Courses that introduce students to the visual and performing arts Courses that require students to create videos of aspects of city life

Moreover, students’ first-hand experiences are systematically contextualized by their professors in wide-ranging historical and theoretical discussions, accompanied by intensive writing. It is worth commenting on the academic rigor of the WNY program. For example:

Fall 2007 WNY Courses Course Requirements

Fieldwork in New York

15 hours of fieldwork/week 5 tutorial papers 5 tutorial meetings 3 group seminars to discuss fieldwork experiences

Social Worlds of New York 3-hour Seminar/ Week/12 weeks 5 Course Papers

All based on first-hand observations

Arts & the City

3-hour Seminar/Week/12 weeks 7 Course Papers

6 of them first-hand reports on cultural experiences 1 of them a term paper that synthesizes the

experiences

Craft & Consciousness

3-hour Seminar/Week/12 weeks 12 Papers

11 1000-word, first-hand reports of students’ conversations with/interviews of the 14 seminar guests1 5000-word paper addressing the problem of how craft shapes consciousness drawing on the previous eleven papers as data

How does the review committee define “curricular coherence” and evaluate its “lack”? What is the comparative frame of reference for this judgment? Even more to the point, how did the review committee reach its judgment about WNY’s lack of “curricular coherence” in the absence of post-factum interviews or “written testimonials” from more than 42 percent of the students who have taken the program thus far?

4. On the “uneven quality” of fieldwork placements. The committee argues that the fieldwork placements to date have been uneven, but, once again, the committee provides no detailed information to the faculty about the basis of its judgments about the relative worth of placements.

It is the case that some fieldwork placements to date have been better than others. But the program has developed a roster of very successful placements. For example:

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ARTS & HUMANITIES

Museum of Modern Art Whitney Museum of American Art Dodgers Theatrical Production Resource Group

LAW, ADVOCACY & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

District Attorney of New York Office of the United States Attorney, Southern District of New York Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor for the City of New York Women’s Commission on Women and Children Refugees

MEDIA

ABC News Special Events NBC Sports New York Sun

MEDICAL SCIENCE & PUBLIC HEALTH

Bellevue Hospital, Department of Psychiatry Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Department of Community & Preventive

Medicine *New York Presbyterian Hospital at Columbia University, Department of

Surgery

*Scheduled for spring 2009 under Dr. Craig Smith ’70, chairman of the department of surgery, an enthusiastic supporter of the WNY program

Such placements can certainly be made in many other organizations in areas across the entire range of the Williams curriculum if the College commits to the WNY program and determines to make the program work. What is required is assiduous cultivation of contacts in appropriate organizations, education of those willing to sponsor our students in what we mean by fieldwork, and education of our own students about the importance of energetically assuming initiative in shaping their placements. It is important to note that such effort underpins any kind of experiential education program.

Moreover, the committee’s doubts about the feasibility of maintaining and continually renewing such a network of contacts because of revolving program directors can be addressed by the establishment of a board of advisors to the WNY program consisting of faculty, alumni and alumnae in the city, and already on-board organizational partners. This suggestion was made to the review committee, but its possibility is not discussed in the report.

5. On adjunct faculty. The committee states that some of the teaching done by adjuncts has been “very successful.” At the same time, it states that “the quality of some of the teaching by adjuncts has been sub-par.” In neither instance does the committee provide any specific information. In the five semesters of the pilot program thus far, the breakdown of adjunct teachers has been:

Jerry Carlson Fall 2007

Professor of Film Studies, City College of New York and

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the Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFounder and Host of City Cinémathèque Williams College, Class of 1972

Philip KasinitzFall 2007Fall 2006Fall 2005

Chairman, Dept of Sociology, Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFormer President, Eastern Sociological SocietyFormer Tenured Professor, Williams College

Shamim Momin Spring 2008Spring 2007

Assoc. Curator of Contemporary Art, Whitney MuseumWilliams College, Class of 1995

Tony Robins Spring 2008Spring 2007

Urban GuideFormer City PlannerWilliams College, Class of 1972http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/magazine/04health-t.html

Name Semester(s) in WNY Current Position and Link to Williams

In addition, Williams Professor Jean-Bernard Bucky taught in the WNY program in fall 2005 and fall 2006 and Williams Professor Liza Johnson ’92 taught in the spring 2007 and spring 2008 semesters. Professor Bucky submitted a statement to the review committee, but he was never interviewed by the committee despite the enormously important role he played in fashioning the first two semesters of the pilot program.

Everyone associated with WNY to date has had deep ties with Williams College. These colleagues all worked extremely hard to create truly experiential courses. But the committee did not interview any of the adjunct professors who participated in the program to obtain their input for the faculty’s consideration. [Nor did the committee note the range of men and women that students in some semesters met in the non-Williams adjunct professors’courses. For instance, in fall 2007, in Professor Kasinitz’s course, students met: Joseph Salvo, head of the Population Division of the City Planning Department; James Flateau, political campaign manager for Yvette Clarke who won a Congressional seat; and scholars such as Mitchell Dunier, Robert Smith, Joshua Freeman, and Margaret Chin. In Professor Carlson’s class, students met: Carmen Boullosa, the distinguished Mexican novelist and critic; Michael Davis, librettist and opera director; and Ana Sokoloff, arts consultant and former director of the Latin American division of Christie’s.]

Instead, the committee relied on the SCS as a means to evaluate WNY professors’ teaching of experiential courses. The SCS is an instrument designed to measure regular classroom interactions not courses explicitly designed to be experiential. The committee states that the SCS results were confirmed by written “testimony” of students, but, once again, it provides no specifics. What written testimony? From how many students? About which adjunct professors? What specifically were the students’ complaints?

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6. On student demand. WNY does need to have more than eight students a semester in order to increase the program’s social vitality. The committee has settled on sixteen students a semester as the desirable number, both to achieve differentiated student experiences and interests and to cut down on total costs per semester.

This is a reasonable goal, but one best achieved in stages. Even a program of twelve students a semester will dramatically improve the group dynamics of the student cohort and lower costs. A move to fourteen and finally to sixteen students will further improve group dynamics and lower costs.

The issue of demand for the program is crucial. But it is worth remembering that student demand for the Williams-in-Oxford Programme, established by the executive decision of President John W. Chandler, was low for several years until it achieved its solid reputation among Williams students. Even now, demand for the Oxford program fluctuates from year to year. For 2008-2009, for instance, there were only 36 applicants for the Oxford program. In its early years, Williams permitted students from our sister colleges to attend our Oxford program until requisite demand was achieved. Indeed, the demand for the Williams Mystic program has always been low and regularly depends on enrollment from our sister colleges. Given time and imaginative work, the WNY program can create the kind of program to which Williams students respond in considerable numbers.

7. On cost. The committee presents hypothetical figures that suggest high subsidies for each

student enrolled in the WNY program, amounts that decrease dramatically as the number of students in the program increases. In addition, please note that the committee has calculated into its estimate of operating costs the extremely high tuition fees to NYU for 2008-2009, a move that some faculty members in the WNY program vigorously opposed on intellectual, practical, and financial grounds, but one that was nonetheless approved by the administration. There were no such tuition fees to NYU for the first five semesters of the program.

The committee also gives a brief comparison of WNY’s high costs with Oxford’s relatively low costs, at the same time acknowledging that the comparison is difficult to make because the maintenance and operation expenditures on the College’s facilities in Oxford are calculated differently. The faculty also needs to know how the cost of the WNY program per student compares with the cost of the Mystic program, the Williams tutorial program, and with the “real cost” of a Williams education itself.

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Appendix 1: Williams in New York Pilot ProgramList of students 2005-2008

Semester of Participation Name and Year

Fall 2005 Kara Brothers ‘07Brandon Carter ‘07Lily Gray ‘07Andrew Lazarow ‘07Walden Maurissaint ‘07Krista Nylen ‘07

Fall 2006 Paige Boddie ‘08Mirza Delibegovic ‘08Lauren Estevez ‘08Louisa Hong ‘08Jessica Phillips ‘07Sarah Randle ‘08Benjamin Sykes ‘08Hannah Wong ‘08

Spring 2007 Deborah Bialis ‘08Karina Godoy ‘08Natalie Joffe ‘08Elizabeth Kohout ‘08Katherine Krieg ‘08Kaolin McEvoy ‘08Claire Murchinson ‘08

Fall 2007 Melissa Barton ‘09Nichole Beiner ‘09Lauren Bloch ‘09Emily Fowler-Cornfeld ‘09Craig Hand ‘09Elizabeth Kantack ‘09Rebekkah Marrs ‘09Nicole McNeil ‘09

Spring 2008 Sarah Cobb ‘09Caitlin Colesanti ‘09Anouk Dey ‘09Claire Gallagher ‘09Maya Lama ‘09Morgan Phillips-Spotts ‘09Andana Streng ‘09Sophia Torres ‘09

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Appendix 2: Alumni and Alumnae who have participated in the Williams in New York Pilot Program 2005-2008

Robert Lipp ’60. Senior Advisor, J.P. Morgan Chase. Co-Chairman of The Williams Campaign and Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Williams College Board of TrusteesRobert Margolis ’78. Independent FilmmakerHerbert A. Allen ’62. FinancierJohn Kifner ’63. Senior Correspondent, New York TimesPaul Lieberman ’72. Senior Correspondent, Los Angeles TimesMarc Charney ’65. Editor, New York Times Week in ReviewArthur Levitt ’52. Former Chairman of the American Stock Exchange, former chairman of the

American Stock ExhangePeter Willmott ‘59. Former Chairman of the Executive Committee, Williams College Board of

Trustees, current chairman of the Board of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art InstitutePaul Neely ’68. Current trustee of Williams CollegeLaurel Blatchford ’94. Chief of Staff, NYC Department of Housing Preservation and

DevelopmentTim Ross ’87. Research Director, Vera InstituteBethany McLean ’92. Journalist and author of The Smartest Guys in the RoomJerry Carlson’72. Professor Film Studies at the City College of New York and the Graduate

Center, City University of New York. Founder and host of City Cinematheque.Glen Lowry ’76. Director of the Museum of Modern Art, current member of the Williams

College Board of TrusteesStephen Harty ’73. Chief Executive Officer of Bartle Bogle Hegarty. Current member of the

Williams College Board of TrusteesKimberly Kirkland ’83. Franklin Pierce Law SchoolDuffy Graham ’83. Savitt & BruceAdele Horne ’91. Independent FilmmakerTimothy Shaw ’89. Chef, French Culinary InstituteJack Wadsworth ’61. Morgan Stanley, San Francisco. Current member of the Williams College

Board of TrusteesClayton Spencer ’77. Vice President for Policy, Harvard University. Current member of the

Williams College Board of TrusteesStacy Cochran ’81. Independent FilmmakerShane Tela ’07. Law studentAshley Kidd ’00. Graduate studentHope Coolidge ’75. Current member of the Gaudino Fund BoardValentin von Armin ’03Christine Choi ‘90Mario Chiappetti ‘78

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Thomas Belden ‘76Barton Jones ’68. President of the Williams ClubHarry Matthews ‘67Charles Sena ‘79Illunga Kalala ’05. Law studentAbid Shah ‘02Briscoe Smith ‘60Jeffrey Urdang ’90Paul Francis ’05. Prep for PrepDaniel Levy ‘92. Assistant United States Attorney, Southern District of New YorkMichael English ’95. Assistant United States Attorney, Southern District of New YorkBrendan McGuire ’98. Assistant United States Attorney, Southern District of New YorkTracy Conn ’00. Assistant District Attorney, District Attorney of New YorkAnthony Robins ’72. Urban guide.Shamim Momin ’95. Associate Curator, Whitney Museum of American ArtMichael Needham ’04. Business school studentMarissa C. M. Doran ’05. ActBlue.Dana K. Fassler ’06. International relations student at SAISNathan Winstanley ’04. Advertising executiveMichelle Cuevas ’04. Ainsley O’Connell. ’06. Business consultantWinston Goodbody ’90. EntrepreneurChinyere Okoronkwo ‘83

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Appendix 3: WNY. Program Statement of Pedagogical Goals

Williams in New York is a one-semester experiential education program that integrates traditional liberal-arts scholarship with intensive fieldwork in mainstream institutions in New York City. The program has several pedagogical goals:

To teach students how to do the kind of first-hand fieldwork that, with variations, is a key methodology in disciplines ranging from art history and the classics, anthropology and sociology, to field biology and epidemiological medical research. In the metropolitan context of Williams in New York, this means developing highly refined observational skills; the ability to see both on-stage and backstage realities in big organizations; conversational and interviewing abilities essential to enter fully into the life of particular social milieux; the discipline to set aside personal beliefs, frameworks, and ideologies in order to grasp others’ worlds from their own standpoints; and the analytical command of field materials essential for grounded interpretive work.

To thrust students into several different occupational/professional worlds to give them comparative frameworks against which to gauge their primary fieldwork experiences and to enable them to see the intersection of social networks and institutional worlds in a great metropolis.

To require students to do extensive writing and public speaking about their field experiences as ways of helping them shape and internalize their own criteria for the discernment and appraisal of social realities.

To cultivate self-confident, critical habits of mind to enable students to live rich intellectual lives in the world of practical affairs.

To encourage students to discover and enjoy the extraordinary ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious, and community variety that characterizes New York City via explorations of the nooks and crannies of a great metropolis—from pool halls to Carnegie Hall; from Coney Island to Wall Street; from local Pentecostal churches, to synagogues, to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, to Saint John the Divine Cathedral; from downtown dance clubs to uptown soirées at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; from immigrant communities in Chinatown to East Harlem and Washington Heights; from fashion shows to film festivals; from comedy clubs to poetry jams. And to foster ongoing dialogues among students about the significance of such kaleidoscopic social realities.

To introduce students to the worlds of the performing and visual arts, to the critical appreciation of culture high and low, and to the social and organizational worlds that produce and maintain the arts in the great metropolis.

To teach students the history of New York City, the quintessential world metropolis, the paradigm and embodiment of modernity’s achievements and problems.

To create an institutional forum in which alumni and alumnae of Williams College can become engaged in the ongoing intellectual life of the College; to foster an unbroken dialogue between generations of Williams men and women.

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Appendix 4: Letter from Professor Chris Waters to some participants in the WNY programI am writing to you in my capacity as chair of a faculty and staff committee at Williams that will, this coming academic year, look into the workings of the Williams in New York program. As you may know, the New York Program was established initially for a probationary period. This year my committee will consider the Program in all its various aspects and report to the faculty with recommendations as to the future next May. Faculty will then vote on those recommendations, determining the future of the Program.

Obviously, one of the things we want to do is to solicit as much input from former Williams in New York students as possible. Hence this e-mail. We would be delighted if you could take the time to put your thoughts to paper and send them back to me. What did you enjoy most about your time in New York? What worked and what did not? What did you expect and were your expectations fulfilled? What role did the Director play and what role might he have played? How valuable were the placement(s) educationally? What were the facilities like? What recommendations might you like to see implemented to strengthen the Program? In short, how valuable was your time in New York and what is your overall assessment of the academic importance of the Program? These questions are quite open-ended and merely suggestive of some of the things we are interested in; obviously, anything else you would like to add would be welcome.

Anything you write will be confidential, read only by me and the other members of the review committee (and submitted by me to the committee anonymously if that would make you feel more comfortable). You can write me a longer letter and send it to me as an attachment or simply send me your thoughts via e-mail. But your candid reflections on both the merits and problems of the Program as you experienced it would be very valuable to us as we begin our work.

 I am hoping to call the first meeting of the committee in mid-September and want to have a dossier of materials available to the committee members by then. Hence if you can share any thoughts you have with me by September 5th I would very much appreciate it.

For all former Williams in New York students who will be back at Williams this coming academic year we hope to follow up the written comments with individual or group interviews, so I certainly look forward to chatting with you more about your time in New York in the Fall.

Meanwhile, I hope my request for some written comments is not too much of an inconvenience and that you might be able to spare a little time to share your thoughts with us. The very success of the Program in the future depends on an accurate assessment of it this year, and particularly of the experience of those students who have been part ofit.

All best wishes,ChrisChris WatersHans W. Gatzke '38 Professor of Modern European History

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Appendix 5: Statement from the 16 student participants in the fall 2007 and spring 2008 semesters of the WNY program

We were not interviewed about our WNY experiences by anyone on the WNY Review Committee AFTER our semesters ended, nor did we receive from anyone on the Committee any request for "written testimonials" about our experiences AFTER our semesters in the program.

E-signed by:

Fall 2007

Melissa Barton ‘09Nichole Beiner ‘09Lauren Bloch ‘09Emily Fowler-Cornfeld ‘09Craig Hand ‘09Elizabeth Kantack ‘09Rebekkah Marrs ‘09Nicole McNeil ‘09

Spring 2008

Sarah Cobb ‘09Caitlin Colesanti ‘09Anouk Dey ‘09Claire Gallagher ‘09Maya Lama ‘09Morgan Phillips-Spotts ‘09Andana Steng ‘09Sophia Torres ‘09

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