The freshman quad – where I spent 1972-3. Middle door, third floor, on left.
Yesterday, we took my nephew Brett to see Williams College.
As he just scored a 780 on the math SAT pre-test, it seemed like the right time to go.
I had not been back to Williams for many years, and the place was both the same… and different.
There are a plethora of new buildings. For a school with only 2,000 students, the size and scope of the faciliites and options are staggering. The facilities are fantastic, the campus beautiful.
Like all the other aspirants, we took the tour offered by the admissions office, and soon thereafter we were taken into a ‘typical’ dorm room. (At Willams almost all the dorm rooms are singles. When I was a student, we shared a common room with a fireplace. The fireplaces have been closed off – some safety code, but the buildings and the rooms remain the same).
It was sobering indeed to stand in that dorm room and realize that an astonishing 37 years have passed since I came to Willaism as a freshman in 1972.
Of course, much has changed.
The school then was almost all men. My class was the first year that they tepidly admitted women. In 1972, there were 1900 men and 90 women. (At 5’6″, in a dorm filled with football and LaCrosse players, it was a crushing experience.)
Never the less, in retrospect, I can now see that my four years at Williams were a seminal experience for me. Until then, I had lived a very sheltered life in Long Island, exposed to almost nothing. I could have continued along that fairly provincial path (many did), gone to college, law school and so on, and taken the easy path.
Williams was not the easy path. For me, it was a totally alien, and initially very uncomfortable world. It pushed me and provoked me. I thought often of leaving, and at one point was accepted and almost transferred to the far more congenial and pacific campus at Hampshire, the experimental school. But in the end I stayed.
The school was incredibly intellectually rigorous and demanding. Average class size was 8-12 students. There are no graduate students so all are taught by the faculty. In one year, we read Plato, Kant, Montesquie, Descartes, D’alembert, Diderot and a host of others. But it was intellectual rigor combined with real-world experience. In my junior year, I took off and worked in coal mines in Kentucky and lived with a family in Hazzard County, all arranged by the school.
When I graduated, four years later, I was a very different person from the child who entered in 1972.
Upon graduation, I received a Watson Foundation Fellowship, which paid my way to spend the following three years travelling around the world photographing and learning. It was the start of my fascination with travel, photography and rigorous journalism. The career I have today, and the path I have pursued all trace their way back to my four years at Williams.
All of which taught me that change is not easy.
But it is well worth the experience.
