WEDNESDAY, APRIL 3, 2019 VOL. CXXXIII, NO. 19
RECORD THE WILLIAMS
Andy Briggs embraces Eph spirit
Chaplains support College community
Page 12
Page 8
THE INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER AT WILLIAMS COLLEGE SINCE 1887
SPECIAL STAFF EDITION
Staff discuss low morale, feelings of alienation Custodians recount discontents with management; some cite Williams Staff Committee, strategic planning as encouraging steps toward staff inclusion By DANNY JIN EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Among College staff, a “significant morale issue on campus, especially among support staff workers” has existed for up to a decade, according to the Williams Staff Committee (WSC). Staff members say that they feel expendable and unvalued at the College, a perception that is exacerbated by a lack of involvement in decision-making and an inability to advocate for themselves. Fear of “retaliation,” staff members said and WSC confirmed, often dissuades staff from voicing their concerns to management. Many staff members expressed hope for change in the near future, however, with the arrival of President Mandel and the beginning of the strategic planning process. Staff members will hold seats on the strategic planning coordinating committee and on each of the eight working groups to assist in determining priorities and initiatives for the College to adopt in the coming decades. Five staff members across Dining and Facilities and one former employee spoke to the Record about management’s disregard for worker concerns,
general feelings of alienation and their experiences of what they felt to be racist, sexist and homophobic treatment. These employees spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation and of losing their jobs. They requested that stories of their individual treatment not be published because they feared they would be identified and face retribution for speaking publicly. Comments from WSC suggest that other staff have expressed similar concerns to WSC but that they have been afraid to voice their opinions to managers. Four custodians who spoke extensively to the Record are identified in this article as A.Z., B.Y., C.X. and D.W. The initials have no correlation to their names. The 2009 Faculty-Staff Initiative (FSI) Report documented many of the problems that staff continue to face. FSI was a grassroots group of faculty and staff “concerned about problems with recruiting and retaining faculty and staff of color.” “Staff often feel that they are valuable only in relation to the services they provide for faculty and students and are, therefore, dispensable and replaceable,”
College Staff by the numbers
20%
854
College staff members
Staff members work second jobs
How would you rate your morale at work...
31%
2
Very Low
Low
continued on Page 4
3
16%
3.5 avg
How would you rate the general morale at work... 1
39%
42%
16%
29%
3.3 avg
Moderate
4
High
5
Very High
INFOGRAPHIC BY WILLIAM NEWTON/PRODUCTIONS MANAGER. DATA FROM 2017 STAFF SURVEY.
Staff members reflect on Pay disparities among Dining and Facilities 2009 report, unresolved workers remain after 2010 pay restructuring issues of equity, inclusion By DANNY JIN those hired before the change hourly staff members are in Din- The College aims to pay each of EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
By JEONGYOON HAN and REBECCA PARK RECORD STAFF Staff, including administrators, have said that while the College has made improvements regarding well-being and retention of faculty and staff of color since the release of a grassroots report from 2009, work needs to be done to make the College a more inclusive and welcoming space. The formation of the Faculty-Staff Initiative (FSI), the group that released the 2009 FSI Report, was prompted by departures of faculty of color in 2007. Assistant Professor of English Kimberly Love’s and Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Kai Green’s leaves prompted renewed interest in the College’s relationship with its faculty and staff of color, and faculty members told the Record in February that many problems presented in the report were still relevant, referencing problems that minority faculty face. As Professor of American Studies Dorothy Wang noted, however, staff also face similar issues regarding diversity and inclusion. “It soon became clear that minority staff were also having issues,” Wang said. “And then finally what it ended up being was actually an organ for staff members in general to have a voice, because staff had very little voice at Williams.” Staff in various positions and departments at the College have said that problems raised in the FSI Report affect the sense of inclusion and equity for many staff, particularly those of color. Some, as mentioned in the FSI report, feel as if they are viewed as “dispensable” or not as “legitimate mem-
bers of the community.” Many said that such issues stemmed from a larger divide between faculty and staff, and between administrative staff and support staff that has persisted at the College. Laini Sporbert, a health educator at the College and a signatory to the original report, said that such divides reinforce a larger FSI recommendation for inclusion that has yet to be fulfilled. “I think in many cases the support staff feel like the lowest on the rung of the totem pole,” said Sporbert, a member of the Williams Staff Committee. “As much as I – as an administrative staff person – like to think of us as an equal group, I also know that there are big discrepancies… And I'm not sure the sense is that Williams would fight harder to keep its current skilled staff (whether a minority or not) from moving on. I know a few examples of former staff leaving Williams, who… ultimately left the College because they didn't feel valued or supported by Williams enough to stay in that position.” The Office of the Provost, which is responsible for strategic planning relating to admission, financial aid, and institutional research, said there are efforts being taken to increase diversity and inclusion on campus. The Office for Information Technology recently had a staff member lead the rest of the team through “an exercise demonstrating the role of implicit bias and the importance of creating an inclusive environment for the entire campus,” Provost David Love said. The Institutional Research Office is supporting the data and continued on Page 6
Disparities in staff wages have resulted from the July 2010 discontinuation of a pay system that provided seniority-based raises for hourly staff in Dining and Facilities. Staff hired under the market-driven system instituted after the change have earned less than employees hired under the former system, although they work the same job. The five-year step plan previously in place had allowed staff to receive scheduled raises in their early years on the job, as well as a yearly cost-of-living increase. Currently, in addition to the costof-living increase, staff members receive a yearly market adjustment increase and have the opportunity to receive merit-based raises at the discretion of their supervisors. Staff members no longer receive a raise based on time served as they had under the step system. The Williams Staff Committee (WSC) provided comment on sentiments that staff members have expressed regarding the discontinuation of the step plan. “The elimination of the step program has made it virtually impossible for newly hired staff in a number of departments to ever reach the wages earned by staff who were hired prior to the elimination of the program,” WSC representatives wrote in an email. “Compensation concerns are a huge contributing factor to the staff morale issue the College is currently facing.” Custodial wages, for example, rose to $22 per hour at the end of the five-year step plan for
but typically peaked just above $15 per hour for those hired immediately after the change. While the College instituted a $15 minimum wage beginning Oct. 19, 2018, an imbalance of pay remains between workers performing the same job, although all make more than the market median, according to Fred Puddester, vice president of finance and administration. Director of Human Resources Danielle Gonzalez said that the October increases sought to address these discrepancies.
ing and Facilities. “The change in the plan at that time was to bring Facilities and Dining plans in line with all of the other College departments’ pay plans, which were market based,” Wright said. The previous pay system had been instituted in the 1980s and was not as current as a marketbased system, according to Gonzalez. Puddester said that while he was not at the College when the change was made, he has learned that it was an effort to have “one uniform system for all employees”
“We work hard, and we deserve the money that we make. And it isn't fair that Joe Schmoe isn’t making what Annie Hannie is making because we're both out there in the sleet and the freezing rain doing the same job.” Member of custodial staff “The pay adjustments we made this past fall were a result of some internal disparities we identified between newer hires and those who have been in their roles for a long time,” she said. “We have not made changes to the compensation plan structure.” Bob Wright, executive director for Facilities operations, said that the 2010 change in pay structure was intended to shift Facilities and Dining to a market-based pay system, which was already used for other College employees. The majority of the College’s
without giving “double bumps” to any one department. “It was Facilities and Dining that were on a separate pay scale from everyone else at the College,” Puddester said. “The decision was made for equity purposes to make things equal and not treat those two departments differently from everyone else … It was an extra pay increase each year for those two departments only.” Employees hired under the new system made above market wage but less than their colleagues, Puddester explained.
its employees at or above the 60th percentile of pay for similar jobs with similar experience, as well as providing additional benefits. “Through our HR department we do a pretty good job of identifying like positions at other institutions,” he said. “There are some positions – I know that there are some in Facilities – that are much higher than the 60th percentile… Added to that, we have much better benefits than most of our peers in terms of retirement payments, health insurance, leaves, so we have both wages that are above the median and benefits that are above the median for similar jobs and for similar experience.” Staff members say that the shift from seniority to merit as the basis of raises – outside of cost of living – leaves them without a consistent mechanism for wage progression. Favoritism and poor evaluation have been cited as reasons for stagnant wages. “The awarding of merit raises often depends on one’s supervisor,” WSC representatives wrote. “Merit raises are also typically not very significant, often coming in the form of a 1 percent raise or a one-time bonus. The college’s performance evaluation process also needs to be significantly revamped. It currently is not tied to merit raises.” If supervisors do not provide evaluations, staff cannot receive raises. Wright said that custodians are evaluated each year, although some custodians say that their supervisors have not conducted evaluations. continued on Page 6
WHAT’S INSIDE 2 OPINIONS A statement from the Williams Staff Committee
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2 OPINIONS
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MICHELLE WARYJASZ
On my birthday, a random dog wandered into Hopkins Hall and threw up in my office.
trative staff have ample opportunity, in a variety of formats, to lend their voices on various issues. Additionally, the coordinating committee should ensure that support staff are represented on the committee’s working groups. Too often, inclusion of staff voices in planning efforts and committee work is done via administrative staff, whose concerns and perspectives might differ greatly from those of support staff. Finally, the College should guarantee staff’s ability to fully participate in this process, by ensuring that they can attend relevant meetings or providing time off from job responsibilities to participate in these campus-wide conversations, particularly for support staff. The College must also work to strengthen the perception of a robust reporting process for issues of inclusion and equity amongst staff. As staff members noted in this issue, many feel unable to report concerns about workplace climate due to fear of retaliation or belief that their concerns will not be taken seriously. The College should reaffirm its commitment to taking the concerns of staff seriously and reassess whether the current systems of reporting and accountability are adequate and appropriate. Staff are a vital part of our community at the College and are essential to the College’s core mission. We owe them nothing less than the respect and sense of belonging that all of us hope to have in this community, and it is imperative the College pursue the changes that will grant all staff at the College the appreciation and empowerment they deserve.
Williams Staff Committee Statement
LETICIA GUZMÁN
On the work of the WSC and issues faced by staff
The suprised faces of students when I joke around and tell them their meal costs $4.99.
By WILLIAMS STAFF COMMITTEE
JIM REISCHE
Fake dead vulture on Dodd. I barely even know what that sentence means myself.
CHRISTINE MÉNARD
One night, I [found] a student in the Virtual Reality room on the floor terrified and screaming.
The Record welcomes op-eds and letters from all members of the College community. The Opinions section is designed to reflect the varied views and ideas of the College community, and the publication of any letter or op-ed does not indicate an endorsement of the views contained therein. Submissions should be sent to kc17@williams.edu and kzy1@williams.edu by Sunday at 5 p.m. for inclusion in the next Wednesday issue. Op-eds range in length from 650-800 words, and letters are 500 words or fewer. The Record will not publish pieces that have appeared in other publications. Pieces submitted to the Record are not guaranteed a spot in the upcoming issue. For Record policy information, please see our website, williamsrecord.com.
ing our community’s culture around how we treat and value staff, especially support staff, at the College: appreciation and empowerment. We must first make explicit strides to elevate and express our gratitude for the often unheeded work that staff at the College do. But appreciation alone is not enough and will not deliver the tangible improvements that will make staff feel truly welcome at Williams. The College must also make structural changes that give staff the voice they deserve in decisions affecting them. With regard to appreciation, this cultural shift will come about through small daily actions on the part of students and faculty. Just as we value and tout personal relationships amongst students and faculty as one of the College’s strengths, this should extend to staff as well. Students and faculty can enact a broader cultural shift through making the conscious effort to get to know the staff they interact with on a daily basis. Other recent grassroots efforts to recognize staff contributions – such as the studentorganized Dining Services Appreciation Week – also model the type of public appreciation that can center and validate the important work that staff do. There also must be a structural effort to center staff voices in decisions that affect them, such as those surrounding benefits, schedules and workplace culture. The College is in a perfect position to engage in this work as it begins its strategic planning process. The coordinating committee should ensure that support and adminis-
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Op-Ed and Letter Submission
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Williams College claims as its mission, “to provide the finest possible liberal arts education.” Achieving this lofty goal depends not just upon the students and faculty, but – crucially – upon the efforts of the College’s administrative and support staff. The College community, before it can engage in any learning, must be safe, wellfed and in clean surroundings. The resources beyond the classroom that support members of the community and make them feel welcome are too numerous to count. All of these contributions to the College’s mission come from our staff – partners in the College’s educational mission that truly make this institution what it is. As the reporting in this and other issues of the Record, along with the panel on staff issues at Claiming Williams and the Faculty-Staff Initiative Report, have documented, there are deep and abiding concerns amongst staff at the College. Many staff – particularly support staff – feel their voices are undervalued in decisions that directly impact them and that they are considered as less-than-full members of the College community. They have expressed concern in many areas: compensation and benefits, workplace culture, equity and inclusion and participation in decision-making processes. This should be worrying to all of us as members of the College community; if staff do not feel that they are seen as full and equal members of our community, then we are failing in building a truly inclusive and equitable environment. We see two inextricably linked priorities in reshap-
April 3, 2019
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Today’s edition explores issues that staff face at the College and details facets of staff members’ lives both at and outside the College. The staff issue, like all other issues, investigates problems that affect members of the College community. We chose to publish a staff issue due to the relative lack of attention that has been devoted to staff concerns in campus conversations. As a student newspaper, we have the capacity to spur conversations about staff concerns by making
An elected body, the Williams Staff Committee (WSC) provides suggestions and input to the senior administration and the broader college community, proposes initiatives that improve staff thriving on campus, contributes to the richness of our community and enhances the college’s mission of providing the finest possible liberal arts education. The committee seeks to increase the visibility of staff on campus by: • addressing ideas and concerns brought to the committee, • advancing their role in the life of the college by assessing staff roles on campus and advocating as needed • and by fostering inclusion and participation in the College community. The Committee… • Brings ideas from the staff to senior administrators and in return, serves 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. • Makes recommendations for staff representation on campus committees, including standing and ad hoc groups, and working groups. • Advises, as appropriate, staff members who sit on other standing and ad hoc committees that address issues concerning— or of interest to— staff. • Advises staff on individual needs or concerns. • Identifies other ways for staff to engage with each other, students, and faculty in an effort to promote community and to make staff a more visible, involved and recognized part of the wider college community. Broadly speaking, there is a morale issue among staff on campus; that is, morale is
quite low despite many employees reporting pride in their work and a high level of collegiality in their office/ department. A number of factors impact this issue, the most pertinent perhaps being staff compensation and a lack of staff representation and staff voice on campus. Many staff express concern over the college’s current pay structure and the lack of transparency surrounding staff compensation. On a similar note, the format for performance evaluations is cumbersome, not directly linked to merit raises, and inconsistent in its implementation across staff departments. The place of staff in campus decision-making processes at a faculty-governed institution is also something that the WSC has been trying to navigate. The committee is not challenging the principal of faculty governance; however, we are hopeful that staff will begin to have a place in decision making processes that directly impact staff job responsibilities and the staff community more broadly.
readers aware of these concerns through our reporting. This issue does not claim to encompass all stories relevant to staff at the College; such a pursuit would be impossible. We hope that writing about the concerns that have been raised to us will contribute to and help sustain ongoing conversations about equity and inclusion for staff at the College and that more staff members will become comfortable voicing their concerns. Custodial workers describe a culture of fear and alienation in the workplace that makes them feel unvalued by management. Custodians who spoke to the Record expressed fear of retribution for speaking to the newspaper, including fear of losing their jobs. While the Record does not typically publish anonymous quotes, we granted anonymity
to five current or former Facilities employees, a support staff member and a staff member in an administrative department out of a desire to elevate these voices and to publicize their opinions without putting individuals in positions where they felt uncomfortable or at risk. These workers said that traditional mechanisms, such as speaking directly to supervisors and reporting problems to Human Resources, failed to address their concerns. Conversations between Record reporters and the Williams Staff Committee suggest that staff in other departments share similar concerns but that they have been reluctant to present their opinions publicly. One Dining employee, for example, spoke to the Record but asked not to be quoted. Faculty members who have spoken to staff about staff concerns in the workplace have ad-
vocated for their colleagues, such during the 2018 Committee on Priorities and Resources forum. Students, as well as faculty, can use positions of safety to endorse staff interests. In order for the College to better incorporate staff in its mission, however, it must develop formal and functional mechanisms for staff advocacy, a need articulated in our editorial. The strategic planning process and its involvement of staff has inspired hope for improvement, some say. These sentiments have been encouraging, and we hope that this progress translates to prolonged campus discussions of staff concerns. We would like for our coverage to devote increased attention to challenges that staff face, and we hope that this issue starts to work toward that goal. Danny Jin, Editor-in-Chief
April 3, 2019
FSI Report 3
The Williams Record
Excerpt from the Faculty-Staff Initiative Report (2009) Staff Matters Admittedly, improving the climate for Staff at Williams is a challenging task given the diversity in backgrounds, responsibilities, and educational levels represented. One might expect that concerns would vary dramatically by department or that significant differences would exist between the concerns of salaried versus non-salaried staff. Interestingly, this is generally not the case. FSI conversations highlight several overlapping themes that negatively impact staff experience regardless of department or salary type. These issues are addressed further in the sections below. One main conclusion became quite clear: we cannot successfully recruit or retain staff from under-represented groups until we improve the climate for all staff on campus... Staff Experience One major area of concern is the unfortunate but commonly held perception that staff are not considered legitimate members of the Williams community. Staff often feel that they are valuable only in relation to the services they provide for faculty and students and are, therefore, dispensable and replaceable. While an administrative hierarchy is natural in any institution, support staff in particular feel they are at the very bottom of our institutional hierarchy, and thereby, less valued than others. This leads to a culture in which staff do not feel comfortable reporting concerns because they fear it will lead to some sort of retribution, such as less appealing assignments or hours, or even termination. This experience is especially uncomfortable for staff of color or staff with language barriers who deal with insensitive comments or assumptions made about themselves or other members of their group. These types of incidents often remain unreported for fear that staff members will be perceived as “overly sensitive” or as “pulling the racial card.” Another overall sentiment is that there is a lack of support for innovation or change. Given that the average staff person has been at Williams for 12 years, new staff additions or staff members with different perspectives often feel ignored or as though their ideas are not taken seriously. Moreover, while staff members are often evaluated by their superiors, they are rarely provided formal opportunities or encouraged informally to provide constructive criticism to their managers. Rarely do staff
feel able to question their managers’ methods or practices in an open and thoughtful way. Professional Development and Mentoring Lack of clear expectations regarding individual roles and departmental goals exacerbates many staff members’ sense of being relatively undervalued at Williams. Many staff are unaware of opportunities for professional development and of what is expected for growth and upward mobility. Part of the problem lies in the opacity of hiring and promotional practices, which in the past (and thus reflected in many current managers’ positions) were often based primarily on longevity and personal relationships, rather than relying on merit or leadership potential... Yet a commonly held, if inaccurate, perception among non-salaried staff is that hiring and promotion in those ranks relies on personal connections and years in the job more than merit. The difference between the perspective that hiring and promotion practices are merit-based and the perspective of many staff members who work with or under staff who were promoted under the older system illustrates the challenges that Williams’s current environment creates for staff satisfaction. For both salaried and nonsalaried staff, the presence of managers whose talents do not regularly outshine those who rank below them often leads to frustration and a sense that doing the bare minimum is all that is required. In recent memory, this has also led to the loss of talented professionals, particularly young staff and staff of color. Another factor contributing to the professional frustrations of many staff members is the lack of management training received or expected of many directors, managers, and supervisors. Many persons in positions of authority have not been trained to manage teams, to promote the professional development of their staff, or to inspire creative approaches to the work at hand. At worst, this leads to loss of some of the most promising members of our staff. At best, it leads to departments that simply maintain the status quo rather than seek to innovate and improve. Providing formal mentoring to staff members at all levels would help clarify expectations of how each department’s and individual’s work contributes to the department’s success and to the College’s educational mission. Many departments do not promote or facili-
tate professional development opportunities, such as attending conferences or training workshops. Moreover, staff rarely feel that they are encouraged by their leadership to participate in Williams community activities or spaces outside of their department, such as administrative committees, clubs, cultural events, athletic facilities, and other benefits that seem natural extensions of working at a liberal arts college. Service Mirroring the faculty experience, administrators of color and from other under represented backgrounds carry a substantially heavier service burden than the typical staff member... This lack of recognition regarding staff service often leads to burn out, loss of motivation, or worse, their departure from the institution. More generally, staff want to be encouraged to participate more fully in the policy making and administrative aspects of the college. They want their voices heard on administrative committees and the staff council… Some staff have advocated and requested to be placed on administrative committees to no avail, while other staff members are overcommitted to College service and too often asked to participate. Impact on Students and Faculty It is of utmost importance that we keep in mind that the students we strive to serve are not just educated in the classroom. They also learn from interactions with and between members of our campus community. The issues mentioned above do not go unnoticed by Williams students. Because many of our staff members are front-line contacts with students, they interact more with students on a daily basis than do faculty or senior staff. Improving the environment for our staff is in our students’ best interest... What students learn about intergroup relations at Williams will undoubtedly impact their expectations. It is imperative that all staff (and faculty) model for students an environment where diverse individuals feel welcome to live, learn, and thrive. In multiple ways, staff members have a relatively significant impact on faculty members appointed fully in programs that address race, ethnicity, and diaspora. Administrative assistants play central roles in the quality of professional life of faculty members appointed in AFR, LATS, and AMST because, unlike their program colleagues whose appoint-
ments are in departments, these faculty members have no other institutional home to turn to for administrative help. Recommendations The following recommendations provide first steps toward improving the experience, retention, and recruitment of staff members at Williams College: 1. Establish a systematic method of tracking the staff experience... 2. Create straightforward and transparent professional practices and communication with staff inclusive of issues related to class, gender, race/ ethnicity, sexuality, and staff status in order to decrease confusion and improve staff morale... (a) …We think that increased, effective diversity and inclusion training of managers and administrators will improve the College’s ability to recruit beyond the Berkshires in order to attract staff of color from more cosmopolitan regions. (b) Increase the review of departments and increase training opportunities for managers, particularly around issues of team building and inclusion... Departmental reviews and opportunities for managers to obtain training about supervision and staff development should be a cyclical and common practice. (c) Provide educational opportunities for staff, particularly courses in English as a second-language. This could provide teaching opportunities for our students while providing an important service for departments that face language barriers... In addition, offering educational opportunities in technology several times throughout the year would increase the efficacy and efficiency of most departments and should be considered a requirement for staff development. (d) Encourage staff to pursue a variety of professional development opportunities. For example, salaried staff are unable to receive compensation for providing college services that extend above and beyond their official positions... 3. Infuse the campus climate with a sense of community that includes staff. Staff offices devoted to issues of diversity and inclusion and the many staff members who work as campus leaders on these issues are interested in creating such an inclusive campus community... Staff often feel left out of the intellectual activities available on campus. (a) Use the wide participation by staff in Claiming Williams 2009 as
a model for creating opportunities throughout the year for staff to be invited to participate (without loss of pay) in intellectual/academic/community building events... (b) Communicate clearly and accessibly about whether and how staff members can join campus-wide groups and committees… (c) Provide ready access to information about how to navigate the Williams system of posting and filling positions and how to pursue professional development opportunities... (d) Acknowledge and address community perceptions and misperceptions about differences between and within “support” and “administrative” staff... We think it important that senior staff members take direct steps to improve the campus community’s understanding of support staff members’ invaluable contributions to the College’s mission. It is also important to acknowledge the diversity of ways in which staff members contribute to the core educational mission of the College. The contexts of staff interactions with or separation from students vary significantly... Some senior staff members and other administrators rarely speak with students. “Hidden” aspects of staff members’ important roles should be acknowledged... (e) Encourage Williams senior staff to include or continue to include “faculty and staff” in most of their addresses. This measure would help strengthen morale and model a campus climate of mutual respect and earned recognition... The compression of status of all non faculty at Williams to one all inclusive, lowcaste like, seldom recognized category remains an issue through which staff feel overlooked as members of the community. 4. Make explicit how Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action policies are carried out. 5. Create a position of ombudsperson. In the absence of an ombudsperson, some staff members go to the Office of Human Resources for questions or complaints about workplace issues; others turn to senior staff members to whom their office reports...because of the way Williams often operates as a “family,”... there are fears that College personnel may have confidential conversations with one’s supervisor. There needs to be an official ombudsperson who is separate and removed from human resources staff...
KEVIN SNYDER ’09
Reevaluating accessibility at Williams Calling for a transformation in the College’s practices By PHACELIA CRAMER and ELI CYTRYNBAUM
DARIN LI ’21
On Feb. 19, President Mandel sent out a campus-wide email in response to the Hollander memorials. In the email, Maud claimed to support the aims of the students, but also expressed the need to disassemble the memorial due to violations of fire code and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This call for accessibility was a large part of why students were so willing to remove the memorial; they respected the right that every community member has to access a space, physical and otherwise. The email’s rhetoric of accessibility, while legally legitimate, was a selective tool to further the agenda of disassembling the memorials. As students who think deeply and often about issues of access here, we immediately noticed that this instance of naming “accessibility” as a College priority was an exception. Nowhere else does the College institutionally prioritize access: not in the overworked and understaffed office of accessible education (OAE), the lack of disability studies classes, nor the low numbers of neurodiverse and physically disabled students admitted to this college. But at a place like Williams, whose prestige depends on exclusivity, what does it mean to discuss accessibility? When a certain type of high-level, intellectual able-bodied performance is required for admittance into this community, what is the framework and historical context in which we are even having these conversations? Since Maud cited it in her email, let’s start with the ADA. Rather than invoking the ADA in response to only activism, how well does Williams ensure the rights the ADA guarantees? The ADA was signed into effect in 1990 with the goal of formulating a legal basis on which people with disabilities could seek protection from discrimination. The ADA further sought to force a broader conception of disability than was popularly held at the time. Conversations of accessibility generally focus on tangible things: elevators, ramps, automatic doors.
Material and physical accessibility is crucial, and even in this regard much of campus is highly inaccessible. However, when we actually read the ADA, disability is defined as any “physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities” where activities include, but are not limited to, “caring for oneself, performing manual tasks, seeing, hearing, eating, sleeping, walking, standing, lifting, bending, speaking, breathing, learning, reading, concentrating, thinking, communicating and working.” This definition requires broader conceptualizations of access than Williams currently holds. By law, our College’s federal funding mandates compliance with the ADA, though Williams has long struggled to meet the necessary standards. What ADA compliance has looked like at the College has transformed drastically. Practices that are considered normal and vital were once nonexistent. For example, only in 2016, after the hiring of Director of Accessible Education G.L. Wallace, did the OAE start hiring student note-takers and considerably supporting students with temporary accommodations needs, like concussions. In recent years, the number of students the OAE supports has spiked: between the fall of 2017 and spring of 2018, G.L. met with over 460 different students in individual appointments. This is about 21 percent of the student body. While integrative wellbeing services (IWS) has increased staffing and capacity substantially to meet student demand in recent years, the OAE has stagnated at the same two staff since 2016: G.L. Wallace and Jean Grant, who coordinates administrative details. With this staff to student ratio, the office can barely keep up with federally mandated ADA compliance work, much less advance campus conversations of access. As a result, the office spends most of its energies fielding temporary accommodation requests at the expense of advancing dialogue around access and supporting students with chronic conditions here. Additionally, while support structures like the Davis Center can work alongside faculty to build
programming and awareness of student experiences, the absence of disability studies precludes that possibility with regard to topics of access. Instead of selectively name-dropping the ADA, our College must take seriously what decades of disability activism has pointed out: that it is in fact disabling environments that marginalize, exclude, and oppress people and communities with physical, cognitive, and other impairments. Williams is certainly one such environment. Disability activists demand that moves toward accessibility both remove tangible barriers and frame disability as a socially constructed condition. Similarly, the conversation about accessibility at Williams must look beyond the crucial steps of expanding funding and staffing in the OAE and bringing disability studies faculty to this campus. We must consider more broadly how this campus environment creates and exacerbates disability for targeted communities – especially, but my no means limited to low-income, queer and trans students, and students of color. We must recognize that creating an accessible learning environment is not just about installing handrails, making elevators available for use (cough cough, Horn Hall) and hiring more IWS therapists. All of these steps are urgent and vital. But creating an accessible learning environment means structurally and holistically supporting the students who come to this campus. It means transforming any and all disabling structures that cause and/or exacerbate impairment. In other words, if students experience barriers to access at the College, they should not be seen as an individual client with a problem that needs to be “fixed.” Rather the institution is the client in need of structural change that guarantees access for all. Issues of access cannot be addressed by an individual going to therapy, when really, it’s the institution that needs therapeutic intervention. Phacelia Cramer ’19 is a political science major from Eugene, Ore. Eli Cytrynbaum ’20 is a mathematics major from Eugene, Ore.
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The Williams Record
April 3, 2019
College staff, custodians describe culture of fear, underappreciation CONTINUATION FROM PAGE 1 the report stated. “The compression of status of all nonfaculty at Williams to one all-inclusive, low-caste-like, seldom recognized category remains an issue through which staff feel overlooked as members of the community.” The FSI Report demonstrates that these issues have persisted for some time, according to Andrew Cornell, visiting assistant professor of American studies. “All of these voices are saying 10 years later: That hasn’t changed, and they’re feeling the same thing,” Cornell said. Staff surveys that WSC conducted in 2014 and 2017 confirmed the existence of a morale problem to the committee. “According to the 2014 and 2017 staff surveys, morale is low,” WSC representatives told the Record. “And it’s certainly something we haven’t fully moved the needle on.” Staff members hold differing opinions as to how long the morale problem has existed. Many pointed to the 2007–08 financial crisis as the precursor to several changes – including a decrease in departmental budgets, a hiring freeze and the discontinuation of some informal benefits, such as free massages and an annual Christmas party for staff – that suggested to them that the College viewed support staff as the institution’s “bottom feeders.” Others identified a “good old boys’ club” in management that consistently did not cater to the needs of staff. “People didn’t talk about this before – ever,” D.W. said. “Now we’re talking about it, and I think that’s why you think it’s worse, but it isn’t worse. There’s a lot of dirty things that went on before.” The 2009 FSI report detailed “a culture in which staff do not feel comfortable reporting concerns because they fear it will lead to some sort of retribution, such as less appealing assignments or hours, or even termination.” Some staff members told the Record that they are still reluctant to voice concerns because they believe they would anger supervisors. They say that supervisors have punished them in the past with additional and unappealing assignments. “If you have an opinion, or a brain cell, they're not interested,” B.Y. said. WSC said that committee members have heard other staff recount experiences of retaliation. “The fear is real, tangible,” representatives said. “It can be subtle, passive aggressive, but it’s very noticeable and plays out often in the workplace.” Apart from speaking directly to supervisors, staff can contact Human Resources (HR) to report incidents. Some staff say that they had little success communicating with HR, however. A former Facilities worker who left for a better-paying job said that management’s and HR’s unresponsiveness to employees made his department an unpleasant place to work. “People end up stuck feeling like they don’t want to come to work every day because management’s created some type of hostile work environment,” he said, “because the rules aren’t the same for everybody.” Cornell, who studies labor and unions, said that the lack of a union deprives College workers of a formal mechanism to raise concerns and to hold managers accountable, making them more susceptible to mistreatment by management. There is not believed to be any current attempt to unionize College staff.
“If they don't have the kind of collective power that a union represents, employees are more vulnerable to both formal disciplinary procedures and informal forms of pressure and discrimination on the job,” Cornell said. “I think, overall, it’s just the sense of ensuring that you have dignity at work, you’re being treated with respect and that … you’re a member of the community.”
A culture of fear among custodians In late 2017, custodial managment implemented a “rotation system” to switch custodians between different buildings each month. Both custodians and faculty members said that they disliked the system because it undermined relationships and communities formed between those who worked in the same buildings. Some custodial teams were told by their supervisor to sort cleaning supplies by colored tape, a directive that many found demeaning. A January 2018 meeting addressed “customer service.” A.Z. said she felt as if she were being “brainwashed,” and B.Y. interpreted the meeting as a threat. “It was basically, ‘Put a smile on your face. There are cleaning companies knocking on their door every day [interested in custodians’ jobs], and none of us want that to happen,’” B.Y. said. Faculty members in Hollander Hall raised concerns about the rotation system at a Committee on Priorities and Resources (CPR) forum in early 2018, and the program was discontinued that spring. “We became involved because we cared about our colleagues, and how our colleagues were being treated, how our colleagues were not being involved in the thinking about their daily professional lives,” said Professor of Russian Janneke van de Stadt, whose office is in Hollander. van de Stadt also expressed concern that custodians felt unable to effect change by articulating their own discontents. “Your workers should not be living in fear,” she said. “The fear and the reality of retaliation, is a form, conscious or not, of controlling what is expressed… I can see how easy it is for custodians to feel that they are expendable, and that they are here to provide a service and a function, and they’re feeling that ‘my own experience here’ and ‘my own daily experience here’ don’t matter as much.” Custodians said that they were not consulted before the rotation system was put into place, although Executive Director for Facilities Operations Bob Wright said that the program was meant to address interests expressed by custodians. “The implementation of building rotation for custodial teams was started as a pilot program in response to custodians expressing an interest in having more variety in their daily work environments,” Wright said. “Response to the initial pilot program, which started with just one team, was positive, so we alter added a second team. However, over time, both teams shared that they preferred not to rotate buildings, so based on feedback from staff we decided to end the program.” Custodians, nevertheless, said that the program was discontinued only after faculty voiced disapproval. “The guys were complaining about it, and nobody was happy with it,” B.Y. said. “And [supervisors] didn’t want to hear it. … We don’t even know what’s going on. We don’t have meetings anymore. They make the decisions. We’re not even
confronted and asked if that’s something we want to do or should be doing.” “Our opinions don’t amount to a hill of beans around here most of the time,” C.X. said. Supervisors’ unresponsiveness to custodians’ complaints has led to physical suffering and injuries, B.Y. said: “When the pressure is on to get A, B and C done when you get back in the building, that’s when injuries happen.” Custodians say that when they have reached out to HR about issues with supervisors, they rarely have seen results. “It’s always dismissed – under the rug. Nobody ever deals with it," B.Y. said. “If you go to HR, they’re going to side with management.” “Typically, they're not very good at getting back to you on anything,” C.X. added. Director of Human Resources Danielle Gonzalez described HR’s commitment to providing confidential response to concerns but did not comment on response time. “If an employee reports any concerns about harassment, discrimination or illegal behavior we are required to take action,” Gonzalez said. “We are incredibly sensitive to privacy and confidentiality in our small community. I also understand an employee can leave HR feeling unsatisfied if they don’t get the outcome they were hoping for.” The difficulty of proving mistreatment can lead to the dismissal of valid claims, according to custodians. “They say, ‘Williams College doesn’t tolerate retaliation,’” A.Z. said. “We are custodians. We clean. You say something – you make the supervisors uncomfortable. He comes and retaliates by using the job, and you never can prove it, but you know because you know what's going on… They call you a troublemaker. I don’t want to lose my job.” Wright said that retaliation has never been raised to him as a concern and that he instituted a monthly forum last year to allow Facilities staff to have their concerns addressed. “In the nearly seven years I've headed up Facilities, I haven’t been presented with complaints about retaliation against an employee who spoke up about a concern or issue. I know sometimes these things don’t reach more senior positions, so this past year I started a monthly Facilities forum. Representatives from each custodial team, maintenance shop and administrative support team share feedback with
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me, and it helps strengthen communications between myself and everyone in Facilities. The representatives are chosen by their peers and serve on the committee for a six-month period, and no topic is off limits.” Some custodians cited the 2007–08 recession as the time of a cultural shift. “Before, with the old supervisors, when people spoke up, they listened. They cared,” B.Y. said. “They left, these people came, and it’s been nothing but a circus… From the day I walked through the door, we had the highest standards for cleaning, we had the highest standards for our food, for listening to the students – all of it. Everybody was plugged in, and now there’s a big disconnect. We don’t even have [much] training." “I talk to custodians who have been here many years, and they always tell me the same thing: Williams College was years ago like family,” A.Z. said. “They cared for you. If you worked here, they took care of you, they were concerned what was going on in your life. If something happened, they would help you. They all tell me when in 2007–08, when the economy crashed down, now we became just a number.” Custodians hold a perception that the College tends to hire externally rather than hire internally for jobs and that education and experience are commonly cited as reasons for rejection. They said that this tendency has prevented custodians from leaving unappealing environments and from being hired into other positions they applied for. “People wanted to change their place of work and work with different people,” B.Y. said of a recent hiring wave. “They took them all right off the street.” Many believe that favoritism impacts their experience in the workplace and that more vocal employees are often disliked. “They change the rules by what they want – it depends on who the person is,” A.Z. said. B.Y. added that supervisors’ biases influence evaluations: “They were putting good people down, and they were belittling them.” After their yearly training meeting last Wednesday, custodians said that they saw management putting in more effort than before, but while some expressed hope for change, others remained doubtful. “I think he realizes that our department is in trouble, and
he needs to make some changes,” B.Y. said about a member of management. “I think they all get it, but what’s going to come of it – I don’t know. I haven’t been able to trust them in the past… There’s going to be a lot of changes in this department, I think, over the next few months, but I do see them being more respectful, being more careful about the words that they choose and the way that they speak to us.” “We feel like it’s a moment when somebody said something, and they’re really trying, but it’s just until everything settles down,” A.Z. said. “One thing they kept saying in training yesterday was, Your opinions matter to us.’ They never have before.” “I’m skeptical about things, too, but all you can do is sit here and be hopeful and ride out the storm,” C.X. said. B.Y. said that she believes the problem lies within individuals in management rather than the College as a whole. “I have a good life because of Williams College,” she said. “I’m not going to turn my back on that. I’m going to keep fighting until we turn these dirty people around… These people did this. I want them to be accountable, not the College.” WSC’s formation and the staff surveys Established in 2012 to provide better representation of staff interests in decisionmaking processes, WSC is an elected body that “seeks to increase the visibility of staff on campus and to advance their role in the life of the College,” as written on its website. The committee works to bring ideas from staff to senior administrators and improve communication within the staff community, among other functions. Although WSC seeks to serve as “a group that the senior administration may consult for staff input on college issues,” it does not formally hold decision-making power. Trevor Murphy, an instructional technology specialist in the Office for Information Technology, served on the 2012 ad hoc committee that led the planning process for what eventually became WSC. Murphy said that the effort grew out of his and other staff members’ experience on the Committee on Diversity and Community (CDC), which he joined around 2008.
“There are few staff on committees, so it was unusual to be there,” he said. “I felt welcomed, but strangely I was told that since I was staff I should work on staff issues. I say it is strange because faculty are not asked to work exclusively on faculty issues, and students on the committee are not asked to work on student issues… I also found myself huddled up with a few staff working on staff issues. We didn’t have an agenda, and we felt that we were too small a group to speak for staff at Williams. No one in our group was in Facilities or Dining Services, for example.” Faculty members of CDC led the campaign to address those problems, Murphy said. Staff members of CDC proposed an anonymous survey to all staff but were close to giving up after they were told “that the administration would not allow staff to survey the staff at Williams.” A faculty member of CDC proposed a staff committee that could provide functions that were previously not supplied. With this new focus, staff began examining peer institutions’ staff committees, which “served social, informational, and support types of functions.” “If a committee wanted a staff member to join they could go to the staff committee and get names,” Murphy said. “Similarly, if a committee wanted to know what staff thought of an idea or proposal, they could take it to this new staff committee. Murphy said that CDC’s staff members thought that they required faculty support to effect change and that he believes staff continue to feel uncomfortable voicing recommendations.” “Staff lacked the power/ courage to stand behind the proposal as faculty did,” he said. “As a staff member I was willing to let things drop if I was told, ‘No,’ because I valued my job over process and governance. Some of the other staff members I worked with felt the same way. One was near retirement, and she was more bold. Every time the proposal was in jeopardy of failing, a faculty member would pick it up and strengthen the proposal and boldly present it. Without faculty support I am certain we would have folded our efforts… I found those advocates, and they helped make it a reality. It was an honor to serve on the CDC and work on a project that resulted in a new committee on campus.”
Staff lacked the power/courage to stand behind the proposal as faculty did. As a staff member I was willing to let things drop if I was told, ‘No,’ because I valued my job over process and governance. Some of the other staff members I worked with felt the same way... Every time the proposal was in jeopardy of failing, a faculty member would pick it up and strengthen the proposal and boldly present it. Without faculty support I am certain we would have folded our efforts… I found those advocates, and they helped make it a reality. – Trevor Murphy, instructional technology specialist
April 3, 2019
Staff inclusion and representation have been at the center of the committee’s pursuits, said Assistant Registrar Amanda Turner, who served on the committee from 2014–2016. “The Williams Staff Committee is continuing to do the difficult work of trying to carve out a space for staff to feel respected and included at Williams,” Turner said. “Despite changing committee membership, the WSC has been able to build on historical work and continue the momentum.” WSC collaborated with the Diversity Action Research Team (DART) in both 2014 and 2017 on surveys sent to all staff, with responses recorded anonymously. Staff ratings for morale were concerning in both surveys, WSC said. In 2017, “your morale at work” averaged a rating of 3.5, on a scale of 1 to 5, over 625 responses, and “the general morale at work” was rated an average of 3.2 by 627 staff members. Averages in the 2014 survey were 3.6 and 3.1, respectively, for the same prompts. In a Claiming Williams panel titled “A Seat at the Table: How do Staff Claim Williams?” on Jan. 31, WSC presented and discussed data from the 2017 survey. The responses the committee presented as encouraging – “the work I do is valuable to the institution,” “the College is responsive when personal or family needs arise,” “I am satisfied overall with Williams as a place to work” and “I am satisfied with my employee benefits” – ranged from 4.0 to 4.4 in their average ratings. Among the lower ratings, “there is a safe way for me to bring up problems at work” was rated an average of 3.6, “I have adequate opportunities for training to improve my skills” was 3.5, “the College clearly communicates its procedures and policies” was 3.5 and “I am paid fairly for the work I do” was 3.3. The lowest average ratings recorded were for “I have adequate opportunities for professional advancement” at 3.1, and “the evaluation process helps me improve my job performance” at 2.9. Previous budgets had specific allocations for professional development, accord-
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ing to WSC. While current budgets may not be smaller in size, they lack specifically designated professional development funds, leaving allocation up to individual supervisors or directors. “Internal professional advancement at Williams has become fairly stagnant since staff aren’t always given the resources to better themselves as it relates to their job responsibilities,” the committee said. “The College’s performance evaluation process also needs to be significantly revamped,” WSC added. “It currently is not tied to merit raises… Sentiment seems to consistently point to the need for improvement.” Ratings for fair treatment based on sexual orientation, religion, race/ethnicity, physical ability, gender and age ranged between 3.7–3.9, an outcome that the committee found encouraging. WSC nevertheless confirmed that the survey contains narrative accounts of perceived unequal treatment on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, class and physical ability. Some staff, however, said they did not fill out the survey because they feared that they would be identified by their responses. Laini Sporbert, a health educator, said that she had heard concerns expressed about anonymity, although detailed information was not shared. “No supervisor or senior staff got the detailed information, but I understand that there is still that fear about saying anything to anyone, whether it be anonymous or not,” she said. “Most people were afraid to do the survey,” C.X. told the Record. “‘Oh, I’m not going to do the survey because they'll know who it is.’ Or ‘I’m not going to do it. It’s not going to rub off anything anyways.’” Some question that the results accurately reflected perceptions held across all departments, speculating that the staff who work in office settings were more likely to offer responses. “A lot of people said it’s fair to work here because the people who responded were office people sitting in front of their computers," A.Z. said.
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"It’s totally different. The College is divided. It’s the office people and the Dining and Facilities people." Vice President of Institutional Diversity and Equity Leticia Haynes said that due to the anonymous nature of the survey, data from the survey could not be broken down by department. WSC members have praised the committee for uniting staff who share concerns and serving as an avenue for discussing important issues. Sporbert called the staff committee “empowering” and, while acknowledging its limitations, expressed hope that it could lead to greater power for advocacy. “The staff committee has been empowering because it’s helped me realize that I’m not the only one thinking about these issues and that I’m not the only once concerned about things happening around campus,” Sporbert said. “We don’t have any decision-making power, and we can’t influence the decisionmaking on campus, but hopefully the staff committee is a step in the right direction toward having a say in big issues on campus.” Current progress and renewed hope The strategic planning process was often cited as a source of hope in WSC’s Claiming Williams Day panel. Mandel began the planning effort in her first few months on campus, describing it as “a way to define priorities and focus investments” and “a chance for us all to work together toward a shared future” during an Oct. 29 student forum. “Since I have arrived at Williams it has become clear to me that people who work here are exceptionally devoted to the school – much more so than what you’d find at most organizations,” Mandel said. “To continue that tradition we want to attract the best people, compensate them fairly and help them feel invested in the College's work. That’s why we designed the strategic planning process to give everyone a voice.” Two staff members – Dawn Jamros, a departmen-
Insights from the
President Mandel has assumed leadership at an institution deeply rooted in tradition and one who appears to respond glacially to change. Sentiments toward staff certainly won’t change overnight, but it appears that the idea of encouraging greater staff involvement in campus decision-making processes is slowing gaining momentum.
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– Williams Staff Committee tal administrative assistant in biology, and Dave Bartels, a security patrol supervisor for Campus Safety & Security – serve on a 14-person coordinating committee chaired by Mandel. Eight working groups, to be finalized this month, will each include staff members. The committee has held staff forums at the beginning of the process and will continue to provide opportunities for communication, according to Mandel. An online comment form is also open for all to submit suggestions or criticisms. “One of the things I love about working at Williams is how much everyone here cares about our mission of educating students,” she said. “It is my hope that the strategic planning process honors that dedication by making sure staff are respected for the unique ideas they can offer as we plan Williams’ future.” A meeting last week with Provost David Love about the strategic planning process also inspired confidence in some custodians. “He wants everybody to participate,” C.X. said. "He
seems to think people will talk more within a smaller crowd versus a big crowd of people, so that's why they’re doing small groups.” Love said that he solicited feedback from custodians regarding how they would like to be involved in the strategic planning process, including anonymous submissions. “It is absolutely critical to create opportunities for staff at all levels to participate in the planning process,” Love said. “[Custodians] liked the idea of being able to submit anonymous ideas and comments through something like Google Forms. I’ve already talked with some of the members of the working groups, and that’s exactly what we plan to do going forward. If planning is done right, every member of the community will feel like they had the opportunity to share their ideas and concerns with the relevant planning groups and know that those ideas and concerns were heard.” Turner, a panelist, expressed “renewed hope” during WSC’s Claiming Williams Day event. “I feel the hard work of the WSC is one reason why staff
2017 WSC Staff Survey
have been included in the strategic planning process and gives me hope for the future,” she said. “Also, staff seem less fearful of speaking up (despite not having the same protections as tenured faculty) – the lessening of fear is another reason I am hopeful – conversations about staff inclusion are finally being broached.” “I think staff are cautiously optimistic about the change in leadership,” WSC representatives said. “President Mandel has certainly made an effort to connect with the staff committee and ask for our assistance in gathering staff interest/ nominations for staff representation on committees for the strategic planning process and the Committee on Free Expression and Inclusivity. “However, President Mandel has assumed leadership at an institution deeply rooted in tradition and one who appears to respond glacially to change. Sentiments toward staff certainly won’t change overnight, but it appears that the idea of encouraging greater staff involvement in campus decision-making processes is slowing gaining momentum.”
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The Williams Record
Staff members balance multiple jobs
2010 pay restructuring causes wage disparities among staff CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
ANIAH PRICE/PHOTO EDITOR
Ada Moreno, a cook at Whitmans’, also cares for elderly people in their homes and cleans apartments. By DANNY JIN EDITOR-IN-CHIEF One fifth of College staff who responded to the 2017 Williams Staff Committee (WSC) staff survey said that they worked another job in addition to their job at the College. Staff members cited financial security as the reason they seek to bolster their income through additional jobs, although they also expressed contentment with their wages at the College. Some say that changes in personal circumstances motivated them to take up another job and that they felt that working multiple jobs was necessary for their wellbeings. “The qualitative responses in the staff survey indicate that the need to work other jobs outside of Williams is for the purpose of covering necessary expenses, not frivolous purchases,” Williams Staff Committee representatives said. In the 2014 staff survey, staff members were asked to rate how much they agreed with the following statement: “I need to work other jobs to supplement my Williams income.” Twenty percent said that they “agree” and 13 percent said that they “strongly agree.” Respondents in that survey were not asked if they worked another job. Ada Moreno, a cook at Whitmans’, works two days a week caring for elderly people in their
homes, as well as one day each week cleaning apartments. Because she works at the College five days a week, she often works two different jobs on the same day. She said that she has been caring for the elderly for eight years and picked up the cleaning job two months ago because she believed it was financially necessary. “It was just something that I knew I needed to do to survive," Moreno said. “I still have time for my family, my grandkids and friends. My grandkids mean the world to me. I feel like I have to be there for them if they need me for any reason. I like to feel secure, like I always have something I can fall back on. You need to have money.” In each of her jobs, Moreno tries to attend to the needs of the people around her and makes sure not to allow any job to interfere with another, she said. She added that one reason she continues working the jobs is that she also enjoys them. “I always try to make everybody feel like I'm there for them,” Moreno said. “I can’t tell the students, ‘I’m tired. I can't cook you an egg right now.’ I do the same at Williams, I do the same at caring and I do the same at cleaning. I never blame any jobs or anything that I’m doing. I don't make excuses. … No one knows what I do outside of Williams because I always come in ready to work.” Moreno came to the U.S. from Honduras 35 years ago, settling
in North Adams. She worked in the Modern Aluminum and General Cable factories before receiving a part-time job at the College 28 years ago, when she was still a full-time worker at General Cable. She began working days at the College and nights at the factory. “I was happy to get a part-time job at first,” she said. “They were really nice. I learned a lot over the years… I would go home, wait for my kids to come home, feed them lunch, then go to work at night." Leticia Guzmán, a prep and service attendant at Whitmans’, said that she works another cleaning job to supplement her income and that she enjoys both her jobs. “As of right now, it's not an option,” she said about working only one job. “I started when I was working 20 hours a week, and I needed more hours. I couldn't leave the cleaning job because I love the people there.” Guzmán said that the benefits, the colleagues and the students make her job at the College exceptional. “This job is the best that I've had – the benefits, the people. I love what I do,” she said. “I like to help the students. I like to fix their meal, maybe if it’s making a sandwich or a salad. You can be friends with them… If it wasn’t for the students, we wouldn’t have a paycheck. We wouldn’t be able to provide for our families… I love my job here.”
April 3, 2019
“It's been two years, and we still haven't gotten an evaluation,” a custodian said. “So how can you even have merit raises?” The majority of wage adjustment comes from cost of living increases, which usually total around 2.5 percent, greater than inflation as measured by the consumer-purchasing index (CPI), Puddester said. Market adjustments and merit increases may total approximately a 0.5 percent increase. “Our staff are not falling behind in terms of purchasing power,” Puddester said. “CPI has been 2 percent or less for the last eight years, and each of those years employees got 2.5 percent. My recollection is, in the 2000s, the raises were much greater than 2.5 percent, but certainly, the eight years I've been here, the staff salary increase – not including market adjustments – was in excess of inflation, which is remarkable in and of itself. It’s a system based on the market. A very small percentage of it is merit based.” There is a “perception that the College is not investing in the betterment and retention of their staff,” according to WSC. Some view a perceived lack of resources devoted to staff as evidence of the College’s priorities. Staff are often unable to attend conferences “directly related to the work deemed as necessary for the college,” WSC said. Puddester told the Record in 2017 that although he was not at the College in 2010, he believed the 2007–08 recession had been a factor in restructuring of pay. He said on Friday that he understands “fairness” – terminating the separate system for Facilities and Dining workers – to have been the key motivation for the change. He said he also suspected that pressure to “protect jobs” at the height of the recession could have been a motivator. The College did not lay off any employees during the recession, Puddester said, although some positions were
not filled when they became vacant. Wages were also frozen in 2009, meaning that employees did not receive a cost-of-living increase. “We didn't lay anyone off during the recession, which is remarkable ina nd of itself,” Puddester said. Some informal benefits enjoyed by staff – among them free massages and an opportunity to attend an annual Christmas party – were also discontinued after the recession. “They said, ‘We’re going to give it back to you. We’re going to take away for a little bit, and we’ll give it back,'” said a custodian who was at the College during the recession. “Nothing came back.” “If they started bringing us all back up again, it’s going to cost them money, which isn’t something they’re lacking in,” said a custodian hired after the end of the step system. “When you can take [$5 million] and donate it to Mount Greylock High School for their construction project, another $400,000 for the local police department, don’t tell me you don’t have the money – because I don’t believe it.” The College’s budget is divided into an operating budget and a capital budget, according to Puddester. The majority of the operating budget is used for wages and salaries, whereas much of the capital budget is used for construction projects. In the capital budget, over 95 percent comes from the College’s issuing debt, and most of the remaining portion comes from gifts to a specific project but cannot be allocated to other areas. As a result, the College does not use the capital budget for wages and salaries. “You don't want to borrow money to pay your bills – that's not a good practice,” Puddester said. “The fact of the matter is [wages and] salaries are the first- or second-largest area of increases in the operating budget, financial aid being the other. About 60 percent of our budget is [wages and] salaries. We're a people operation.”
The College reviews compensation each year to remain competitive with other institutions and to work toward internal equity. Puddester said that such factors as education and experience complicate issues of compensation. “We continue to monitor that each budget season to see if we want to make any other adjustments to those folks who are a little below the folks they work with, but it’s a little more complicated than just saying, ‘I work job X, and someone across campus works the same job, but he or she gets paid more than me,’ because you have to incorporate experience,” Puddester said. “It’s a complex issue of setting wages based on education, experience, et cetera, but we do a lot of work with keeping pace with the industry. We make sure we’re not paying less than people at other institutions with similar jobs, and we work every year at creating internal equity in our own departments.” Staff members, nevertheless, report that they have seen people turn down jobs at the College due to the wages and others who have left jobs at the College due to the wages. “When I came here, it was in the 93rd percentile that people were hired at Williams and retired at Williams. I can guarantee if you looked into that matter right now, it’s nowhere close,” said a custodian hired prior to the recession. “People walk in the door, they see what’s going on and it’s right back out the door. They’re not paying anything, and they think just because they have benefits, people are going to stay. Young kids are not going to work the way that we work for $15 and $16 an hour to take their lives in their hands at 5:30 in the morning and come here and shovel so people can get in and out of buildings.” “We work hard, and we deserve the money that we make. And it isn’t fair that Joe Schmoe isn't making what Annie Hannie is making because we’re both out there in the sleet and the freezing rain doing the same job.”
Staff equity, inclusion concerns remain 10 years after FSI Report CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 measurement efforts that are critical to making progress in this area on campus. According to Director of Libraries Jonathan Miller, the libraries have implemented a “strategic planning process” that has included discussion groups to converse on “issues of diversity and inclusion as they relate to the library profession.” Another initiative implemented by the libraries has been the creation of the Lowe Fellowship by Head of Special Collections Lisa Conathan, a postgraduate opportunity for historically underrepresented people in Special Collections librarianship to explore the profession. Libraries have also proposed in the budget to develop a threeyear “diversity residence” for an early career professional librarian to come and work for Williams College. “In terms of recruitment, the Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity (OIDE) and Human Resources have partnered to implement a campus-wide program aimed at widening the pool of prospective applicants, mitigating the roles of implicit and explicit bias in hiring, and ensuring that our hiring practices support the broader goals of diversity and inclusion on campus,” David Love said. Danielle Gonzalez, Director of Human Resources (HR), further commented on HR initiatives relating to diversity and inclusion among staff. “While many of our IT system and vendors create constraints on gender reporting, we have revised staff onboarding process for individuals who identify as nonbinary or transgender to ensure gender identity is acknowledged and respected,” Gonzalez said. “Working with our benefits committee, we consistently advocate for robust and inclusive benefits. We host many learning and devel-
opment opportunities for staff and managers, one example was a session called Developing a Diverse Team, designed to enable managers to take full advantage of the productivity potential inherent in a diverse population. In addition, HR works closely with managers at all levels of the institution to emphasize equity and inclusion.” “In 2009–10, HR staff along with other colleagues across campus co-facilitated dozens of day-long workshops, called Building an Inclusive Community, which engaged more
that even as an alum, resettling at the College was still difficult because the Berkshires being a “predominantly white region with a very specific culture” did not resonate with her as an immigrant and Black woman. Wright said being able to travel and visit family while working at the College helped living in the Berkshires be “tenable” for her, but she sometimes questions the College and Berkshires’ compatibility with staff of color. “I do, sometimes, have to question whether this is the best place for me to thrive
they have to take on this work to make their work and social lives viable, I can’t even imagine the scale of that burden.” Sporbert, who grew up in North Adams, said that entering the College was initially intimidating for her because of Williamstown’s legacy as a distinctly affluent part of the Berkshires. “That [sentiment] has gotten better over time, not just with my experience but with Williams kind of expanding its mission to include more students of various economic backgrounds
last decade, but a lot of [the report] felt very familiar. The difficulties that faculty of color face but also staff of color face in looking at the College and living in western Massachusetts, they are all familiar things.” “I don’t even like going there every day because I feel the racial tension – but it’s all swept under the rug,” said one support staff member who requested anonymity. “I have to forget every day that I’m Black.” He said that while he has reckoned with such feelings
“I do, sometimes, have to question whether this is the best place for me to thrive and achieve the highest possible quality of life and I think that racialized folx probably end up asking themselves that question far more frequently than our White counterparts.” Sharifa Wright ’03 Director of Alumni Relations
than 500 staff. The program established a common vocabulary to help staff take part in a dialogue about diversity and inclusion,” Gonzalez said. HR has also been part of the Affirmative Action Advisory Group, the Committee on Diversity and Community and the Trans* Inclusion Committee in past and current years. According to some who spoke to the Record, however, addressing issues of equity and inclusion require not only structural changes but also further reckoning with the College and the surrounding Berkshire area’s history of race and diversity. Director of Alumni Diversity and Inclusion and Associate Director of Alumni Relations Sharifa Wright ’03 said
and achieve the highest possible quality of life and I think that racialized folx probably end up asking themselves that question far more frequently than our White counterparts,” Wright said. “Because of the institutional and cultural history of Williams, that work is ever expanding and the needs in this space are shifting exponentially. You often have to exert a disproportionate amount of effort to realize marginal gains if, any at all, all while, sometimes, having to justify the relevance and the necessity of the work. For PoC [People of Color] faculty and staff for whom D&I [Diversity and Inclusion] is not explicitly in their job description, and yet
and students of color and diversifying the student body as a whole. This has made the place more welcoming to me, as a person coming from a lowerclass background... But as we know from recent events, there are lots of ways Williams feels unwelcoming to some people. Despite Williams changing the demographics of the people that it brings in and trying to make Williams more diverse and inclusive, some might say it still has its colonialist feel to it.” Despite initiatives taken by various offices and facilities on campus, Miller still recognized that these issues of diversity and inclusion among staff raised in the report were ongoing. “We have made some progress over the
and has been able to continue working at the College, he would not recommend to other people of color to work at the College. “You gotta [walk] into the College with all white people around you, in a white place – it’s a mindset,” he said. “The prejudice and the racial tensions – it’s all swept under the rug and people don’t want to talk about it in the open anymore.” Similar sentiments were expressed by another staff member in an administrative department who also requested anonymity. She said that many portions of the report that highlight problematic dynamics regarding equity and inclusion are still pertinent. “Nothing seems
to have changed much since then,” she said, highlighting in particular a statement on page 15 of the original report that states, “This experience is especially uncomfortable for staff of color or staff with language barriers who deal with insensitive comments or assumptions made about themselves or other members of their groups.” “I get that sometimes because my accent or my soft-spokenness,” she said in reference to the report, noting that English is not her first language. Sporbert said it in order to make the College more equitable for all staff, it will be critical for the College to revisit the FSI recommendations. She highlighted the importance of enlisting an ombudsperson distinct from Human Resources – the fifth recommendation from the report – in order to allow staff to openly share their concerns without fear of retribution or termination. Other recommendations that have yet to be fulfilled include, as listed in pages 17 and 18 of the report: establishing a systematic method that sets yearly goals to improve campus climate – the first recommendation; increased transparency in review of departments and training opportunities; and including staff on more administrative committees, particularly the Committee on Priorities and Resources. “I would like Williams to feel like it’s for all of us, that the reason that we have a job is because of students,” Sporbert said. “But for Williams to be a welcoming and inclusive community, it needs to acknowledge everybody that works there and in the varying capacities that they do their work. And that they’re not valuable for their work but for who they are as a human, whether or not they interact with students on a daily basis.”
April 3, 2019
FEATURES 7
The Williams Record
One in One Thousand By CRYSTAL MA STAFF WRITER CJ taught me how to make a vinaigrette when I was too scared to ask the Log Lunch managers during my first semester as a Log Lunch cook. We sat down to gossip about dining staff and talk about bees and Dungeons & Dragons. How was your break? It was good. Brit [Lillie] and I worked the first week and went to Boston the second week to go to this big nerd convention called PAX. My buddy from Philadelphia comes up – Oh! I go to PAX every year – PAX Prime! I got so into collecting those pins... I have a bunch of pins! This past year, I bought two for Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). I should have brought mine to school – we could have traded! Do you play D&D? Yeah! Actually, the manager at Lee’s, [along with] Jerry [Byers], [Jim] Butler and Jordan [Phillips], who are cooks at night in Whitmans’, myself and our friend Chris – we all go together to play D&D at Chris’s house. How often do you play? Once a week, or every other week, depending on how our schedules work. Oh, that’s so fun! What’s the social situation like among Dining staff? We kind of have to work with each other through the day, so you don’t really have a choice of who your friends are. Typically I hang out with Jerry Byers, Jordan Phillips, Jim Butler
and obviously Brit, because she’s my fiancee, and she works here.
CJ HAZELL
I think people should be more conscious of what we eat and how we get it. I’m a big supporter of bees. I love bees. I raise them myself.
So everyone kind of hangs out with each other? There are no cliques? Well, there is to some degree. I mean, when you work in professional kitchens you have the morning crew and the night crew. The morning crew and the night crew are always bashing. You know, you complain about the other one – “Oh, the morning crew didn’t clean this, the night crew just thinks they’re better than everyone else…”
You have bees? Do you keep them at home? I used to. Since my grandfather passed away, I haven’t had time to do it, and our hive got messed up with bears. But I’m trying to get back into it. 75 percent of the food we eat is pollinated by bees. And if you don’t have bees, you don’t have food, unless you hand pollinate. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t think you’re going to want to climb 75 feet to pollinate a tree.
So your social circles form around those groups? To some degree, yes. I mean, when I first started here, I was on nights. My schedule has gotten moved around since then, but I still socialize with the night crew more than the morning crew. A lot of the time, the morning crew is a lot of older people – not that I don’t have older friends or anything – but they’re just, I don’t know, when they go home they just sort of want to go home and watch Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!, and that’s that. The people I hang out with are more my age.
ing is an ethical act.” Any thoughts about that quote?
What advice do you have for students who want to learn to cook? ANIAH PRICE/PHOTO EDITOR TABLETOP GAME OF CHOICE D&D
CONDIMENT OF CHOICE PESTO
FAVORITE MUSICAL GENRE REAL TRAP MUSIC
beach lifestyle. Something about fishing every day, living the simple life, that’s the life for me.
What kind of music do you listen to?
[Laughs.] What do you mean by that?
Would you want to work in a different country?
You’ve told me before that you’re deaf in one ear. How did you lose your hearing?
I’m not against it. My family’s from the Caribbean – it doesn’t look like it. My dad’s grandfather came up here in the 1930s, 40s. He got sick on a boat – he was doing whaling – so they dropped him off in Long Island, and he never went back. So I’d love to go back and work in the Caribbean, but Brit’s a ginger and she burns like you wouldn’t believe, so… But I just like the
I was told as a kid, as we all are, “Don’t listen to loud music, make sure you wear ear protection when you’re mowing the lawn,” stuff like that… I never did. Well, I’ve had subwoofers in my car since I was 15, so I’ve had more than 10 years of loud music every day. And I don’t listen to it quietly, like, I make sure people hear me before they see me.
I listen to real trap music.
Like, explicit rap music. My favorite artists are probably Ludacris, Lil Wayne, Gucci Mane and 2 Chainz. I love Gucci [Mane]. I listen to country music too. Just depends on my mood, you know. My playlists range from, like, George Strait to heavy death metal to rap music… It’s all over the place. I read this quote recently – it’s by Vandana Shiva: “Eating is an ecological act. Eating is a political act. Eat-
Work in a kitchen in the summertime – work in a different kitchen each year. You learn from everybody. You could learn the newest culinary breakthrough from the dishwasher who speaks no English. You could ask five chefs to teach you how to cut an onion, and they’re all going to teach you a different way. That’s the great thing about cooking: You constantly learn. You can never know enough about cooking. How was your cooking class this Winter Study? I had a student, his name was Hector [Fajardo]. No matter where he stood, I’d accidentally get food on him. He stood next to me one day, and I was making whipped icing because we were doing a cake, and he just got icing on him. I think my blender hit him. So he moves across the kitchen. And then we’re doing
something later, on pasta or mashed potatoes, and a piece flew and hit him over there! And I’m like, “I’m sorry, Hector. I think you’re just meant to be covered in food.” What do you love best about your job? I know Teresa [McLain], Irene [Nesbitt], myself and many others take a lot of interest in students’ lives. Everything we do revolves around food. What do you do when you’re happy? You eat. When you’re sad? You eat. When you’re stressed from midterms, you guys eat a lot. When you celebrate, you eat. Everything you do revolves around food. It reminds you of home. I see you all more than your professors ever will. I’ll see you three times a day five days, maybe seven days a week, if you choose to eat at the dining hall. So I will see you all grow up and develop more than your professors will. I try to make you feel as close to home as you can. Because everyone misses home. When you cook, you don’t make money. You don’t get into cooking to make six figures because it’s not going to happen. The most rewarding thing about it is, when you make a dish, you put all your heart and soul and love into this food, and you see someone eat it and they give you the Owen Wilson “wow” face. And you can’t replicate that smile. I remember one time you ordered a pizza downstairs and you gave me a slice, and it was the best pizza I’d ever eaten. What were the toppings? Oh boy. It might have been chicken, pesto, roasted tomatoes, roasted garlic, caramelized onions, maybe arugula? That sounds about right. I love pesto.
Michael Menard, bake shop supply campus with treats By SAM MERMIN STAFF WRITER At 3 a.m. every day in Paresky basement, Michael Menard and the rest of the Paresky bake shop staff are already beginning work on a gargantuan task. On an average day, they make baked goods for all three meals at all three dining halls on campus. If a campus event requires catering, such as a Lyceum Dinner or a special Faculty House meal, the bake shop provides food for that as well. This undertaking relies on only three people: Menard and two other bake shop employees, Richard Noyes and Robert Vachereau. While the small size of the group can make providing so much food difficult, it also creates a simplicity
that makes for a productive and enjoyable environment, Menard said. The bake shop is separate from all other cooking and food preparation facilities on campus. The three bake shop employees have been working together for almost 10 years. At this point, the bake shop is a well-oiled machine. “We don’t even have to say to each other what we need each other to do,” Menard says. “We’re at that point where nothing needs to be communicated verbally.” The small size of the bake shop also means that Menard has a great deal of control over what goes on. He chooses with almost complete freedom what baked goods to make each day. His first priority in selecting what to make is creating something students will
enjoy, though there is also an element of pragmatic decision-making to the task of baked-good selection. “I’m thinking of something I can start and finish in about two hours,” Menard said. “Because then if I’ve got three different things, that’s six hours right there, plus whatever catering and other things are coming up.” This time crunch means that Menard cannot always make the foods he would most like to, but he’s learned how to maximize efficiency. “I’m not interested in what’s the fastest thing I can make,” he said. Rather, he asks himself one simple question when deciding whether to bake something: “How difficult can I make it in two hours?” Baking, though, means much more to Menard than
JACK McGOVERN/SPORTS EDITOR
The bake shop prepares desserts and other baked goods for three dining halls and the catering operation.
ANIAH PRICE/PHOTO EDITOR
A three-person team, headed by Lead Baker Michael Menard, makes baked goods for the entire campus.
simply a job that needs to be finished every day. It is something that genuinely excites him and something he has devoted his life to. After growing up in Springfield, Mass., Menard moved to New York City in his early 20s to pursue baking. There, he attended the French Culinary Institute and went on to work at Sylvia Weinstock Cakes and Levain Bakery. Menard spent 16 years honing his skills and exploring his passion for baking in New York. Nine years ago, he began his current job in the College’s bake shop, which is quite different from the small bakeries he worked at in New York. “[Levain Bakery] was a neighborhood bakery” he said. “[I] knew everyone at the time they [came] down
the steps. It was nice having that kind of intimate community feeling.” But what Menard’s current job lacks in familiarity with customers, it makes up for in the opportunity to work with students. Menard has worked with many students in his time at the College, including six this semester. “They’re wonderful to get to know, and they’re also super helpful,” he said. In particular, he enjoys the variety of baking experience that students arrive with. “People have come to work at the bake shop with absolutely zero baking experience, and then some of them have more than I ever would have guessed,” he said. And for some, the time spent in the bake shop ends up being far more than just
a fun campus job; Menard has worked with students who later went on to pursue culinary careers. As he talked about the role of students in the bake shop, Menard took out his phone and showed me pictures of a Harry-Potter-themed cake he had made with a student. He then excitedly recalled baking cakes shaped like Yoda from Star Wars. When asked about the experience of working with the team every day, Menard chuckled and started smiling. “Everyone can get on each other’s nerves once in a while,” he said. “I’m sure I get on [my coworkers’] nerves all the time. But generally speaking, it’s good. It’s fun when you’re firing on all cylinders and you’re getting things done.”
8 FEATURES
The Williams Record
April 3, 2019
Chaplains offer support beyond religious services By MELVIN LEWIS CONTRIBUTING WRITER Many offices in upstairs Paresky offer a candy bowl or a pile of free pens, but only the Chaplains’ Office offers an “inspiration tea station” equipped with a kettle, tea bags, honey, sugar packets, stirrers and cups. Inside are the offices of the College’s four chaplains – Chaplain to the College and Protestant Chaplain Reverend Valerie Bailey Fischer, Muslim Chaplain Imam Sharif Rosen, Catholic Chaplain Father Gary Caster and Jewish Chaplain Rabbi Seth Wax. Bailey Fischer is a Philadelphia native who worked as a journalist before assuming her current role as a third-generation Episcopalian minister. “Each chaplain holds services,” she said, but “meeting with students is a lot of what we do.” She stressed that the Chaplains’ Office, like the Office of Student Life and Office of Academic Resources, is a “student-facing office,” meaning it exists purely for student support, which sometimes comes in the form of simply attending events and performances. “We support the students when they do the programming, just to say, ‘Ra ra, that was great,’” Bailey Fischer said. “Seriously! If you think about it, you want somebody to show up. That’s a great part of the job.” Bailey Fischer, who began her tenure in July 2018, was particularly excited to come to the College because of the Chaplains’ Office annual Spring Break Out Trip to Tuscaloosa, Ala. Joined by all four chaplains, students, regardless of religious affiliation, volunteer for Habitat for Humanity and attend Christian, Muslim and Jewish religious services.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE WILLIAMS COLLEGE CHAPLAINS’ FACEBOOK PAGE.
Rabbi Seth Wax, Reverend Valerie Bailey Fischer, Imam Sharif Rosen and Father Gary Caster offer students spiritual and emotional guidance. Rosen grew up in Los Angeles and, as a child, planned on being an NBA player. He is the assistant director of the Center for Learning in Action (CLiA), a role that has been combined with that of the Muslim chaplain for many years. In addition to the many programs he oversees, Rosen founded the Positive Pathways Partnership (P3) program based at the local Berkshire House of Corrections, through which students tutor inmates and lead a book club. Rosen was inspired by his work as a former volunteer chaplain for the Vermont Department of Corrections. He says he is “really grateful” for the work done through the prison and believes in its value for the students and inmates. “They’re going in expecting to teach, and they come out feeling that they were taught, that somehow they learned
something new about the human experience,” Rosen said. Rosen counsels students who want to get involved with volunteering through the Lehman Council or CLiA. He does not tell students what they should be passionate about based on where they’re from or what they’re studying. “Sometimes students want to do something completely different from what they’re doing in the classroom; sometimes they’re on the premed track but they want to do something much more literature and humanities focused in terms of their service work,” he said. He describes his role as “sitting with a student and saying, ‘Tell me more about that.’” A Southern California native with training in congregational ministry, Caster has spent the last 26 years working in education. In his first week as a student
at the University of Southern California, he visited their Newman Catholic Center. “Nobody said hello to me, nobody reached out to me and I never went back,” he said. Here, Caster tries to do the opposite, and he has an appreciation for the small size of the College. “I like that the students let me know what they need from me and how they need me to be and who they need me to be,” he said. Caster enjoys speaking at classes and getting students involved outside of campus. Williams Catholic, the College’s Catholic student group, frequently takes trips, but Caster stressed, “All of our activities are open to everyone. You don’t have to be a Catholic to take a trip with us somewhere.” He also teaches interested students how to fly-fish, and he will pay for any student to go golfing
with him. “Sharif golfs,” Caster said. “He’s very good, and we’ve all gone out to play.” Wax is from Sharon, Mass. His career aspirations at one point involved becoming a professor of Buddhist studies, but he eventually decided to be a rabbi. As a member of Sexual Assault Survivor Services (SASS), Wax and other staff are on call on a rotating basis to provide support to students who have experienced sexual assault or stalking. He also leads small, informal learning groups which are open to all. “One learning group is doing approaches to mystical prayer in Judaism; another group is reading contemporary Israeli midrash,” he said. Along with Associate Professor of English Bernie Rhie, Wax leads daylong meditation retreats during Winter Study.
Wax also received a Towards Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity (TIDE) Grant with Integrative Wellbeing Services (IWS) Fellow Ruby Solomon and Professor of German Gail Newman. “This was for faculty and staff to explore whiteness: what that means, how that plays out and how to do antiracism work,” he said. The group meets once a week and works through a book. Reflecting on his schedule, he realized, “Most of what I do actually is not so religious.” Despite the many ways the chaplains engage with the campus, one of their central commitments is counseling students individually, regardless of their faith identities. “In fact, I don’t even know the religious background of many of the people I talk to,” Bailey Fischer said. “But we’re here for them, and we’re here to help them be students, and what you do with that, that’s your business.” All of the chaplains echoed these sentiments. “The main thing is working with students across religious backgrounds,” Wax said. “For me, it’s students who are Jewish and students who are not, with different or no faith traditions.” According to Caster, “everything we do is interfaith.” Rosen blocks out significant time in his schedule in case he needs to counsel a student in crisis. “We’re here to sit with them nonjudgmentally, to help assure them that they’re not alone, they’re cared for and valued, and we’re here to listen with compassion and concern,” he said. And, as always, the inspiration tea station is always there, with or without an appointment.
CSS officers discuss P.E. class promoting women’s self-defense By JANE PETERSEN MANAGING EDITOR Many of the College’s staff play a central role in the teaching mission of the College, and Campus Safety and Security (CSS) officers are no exception. The College’s Physical Education department offers a class called Rape Aggression Defense (RAD), a self-defense program taught primarily by two CSS officers, Associate Director Alison Warner and Officer Erik Kristensen. RAD, which I took during Winter Study in 2018, is a women-only class that teaches students how to identify dangerous situations and fight off attackers. I sat down with Warner and Kristensen to discuss their experiences teaching the class, how it has changed over the years and how the program can improve. JP: How long have you been teaching RAD? AW: I’ve been teaching RAD about 19 years. EK: I’m in my 15th year at the College and 14th year of [teaching] RAD. JP: What made you want to get involved with the RAD program? AW: I’ve taken karate in the past, so self-defense has always been a part of not only my exercise but [something I do] for myself. So, ironically, when I interviewed here... they said, “We have this program – it’s a women’s selfdefense program,” and I said, “That’s perfect,” because it went hand-in-hand with several years of karate. EK: I was asked by the director... if I would get involved in it, and I said I would, and I’m glad I did. Once I got into the program and started learning all the different stuff, I learned it’s definitely good to know. It’s nice to be able to teach it. JP: What’s changed since you started teaching RAD? AW: I think what has changed is society as a whole has gotten more violent. Students through the RAD class have learned that a lot of students
have had different incidents. It could be a sexual assault, or it could be even something a lot less extreme, like a pickpocketing, but a lot of the students taking the class have said that they have already had previous encounters or previous incidents, and that kind of inspired me to keep on with the program and develop it to what it is now. JP: RAD forces you to get really personal really fast with strangers. Is that hard for students? AW: What I kind of find hard is learning from some of the incidents that people have encountered, and some of them are very traumatic and others, like maybe a pickpocketing, are less traumatic but still traumatic... We really leave it up to the individuals to let us know if they can’t do something or feel uncomfortable doing something, and we’ll just follow up and make sure that they’re OK and just to reinforce that they’re safe here. They don’t have to do that part but [we ask,] “Is there another tool we can maybe use, if you don’t feel comfortable, that you’ll have in your toolbox?” Because we want everyone to leave with something, so if for some reason they’re not able to perform that one technique, we try to find that one form that they can do. JP: It’s tough, because that forces you to get pretty personal pretty fast. AW: Yeah, because it’s a short program. It’s only six weeks or so.... Some people open up, and you don’t have to open up. We’re a resource if you want to. JP: You talked a little about modifying the techniques. Have any of the moves or the literature you provide changed at all over the years? EK: Part of the basic program was weapons training. Guns and knives, all that. We’ve made that a separate class. There have been some small changes, but all in all
a lot of the techniques have been the same. AW: I would probably say the one bad thing is that the basic manual is very outdated. Because it is a sanctioned program, we can modify a technique to make it work, but we can’t change that whole manual. We tell the students, “Bear with us,” because we do cover a lot of it, because it’s the program and you have to. But that is some of the stuff that is very outdated. We go to the conference every few years and we brought that up. “Have you gotten any other complaints from students or instructors saying that your manual’s outdated?” we asked. And, yes, they’ve been told that. I don’t know why they don’t update it, because it really isn’t inclusive of everyone. JP: What is your favorite move to teach? EK: Some of the simple ones are the most effective. AW: Like the finger roll. JP: Can you describe how the finger roll works? AW: Essentially, it’s just being able to lock onto a finger or several fingers and just kind of locking them out a little bit so you’re able to control a person if their arm is around you. EK: It’s done in close. If somebody puts their arm around you and you’re walking together and you reach across and grab their hand that’s on your shoulder, you grab their fingers and you step out. AW: You lock it up. A lot of the techniques are just getting control, and how do you get control over somebody? Just locking out joints. EK: For myself, I would have to say [teaching] the ground defense. Because I think [that for] a lot of the students, when we demonstrate the way you get somebody off you, whether you’re on your stomach or on your back, I think that’s pretty eye-opening for them, because you may assume that you’re not going to be able to move somebody who’s on you that weighs 200 pounds, but you can. It’s pretty simple and easy to do.
NICHOLAS GOLDROSEN/MANAGING EDITOR
High schooler Phoenix Hebel works in Driscoll as part of McCann Technical School’s co-op program.
College staff teach in McCann School co-op program By NICHOLAS GOLDROSEN and REBECCA TAUBER RECORD STAFF Teaching and learning at the College do not occur just in classrooms – they are a vital part of the dining halls and the Office of Information Technology (OIT) here as well. Among the longterm employees and College students who staff the College’s dining halls, high school students also put in hours cooking and baking, learning the ins and outs of food service as part of the McCann Technical School co-op program. OIT also hosts students for co-op employment in their network and systems team. The program, in which high school juniors and seniors alternate between a week of class and a week of work in local businesses within their vocational field of study, has partnered with the College for over 15 years. “It’s great to be able to work closely with local education,” Vice President for Campus Life Steve Klass said. “All the work we’re doing with CLiA is one form of that, and this is another.” The collaboration between the College and McCann began years ago as a result of connections between College staff and the high school’s leadership. “There were people on campus who were connected to McCann and just wanted to see those programs develop at such a great, important school,” Klass said. “I think we also were starting to see the need to develop a culinary base here as well.”
The students, who are paid for their work, submit resumes and interview at the College. If accepted, staff assign the students to a co-op that matches their interests, whether it lies in the bakeshop, one of the dining halls, the Office of Information Technology or other placements. The goals of the co-op program are for students to develop their career interests and learn applicable skills outside the classroom. Over the years, the program has evolved to serve its students better, allowing for flexible schedules to fit the students’ extracurricular commitments. Catering Chef James Guiden, who sits on the board of directors at McCann, works to ensure that all students have valuable, hands-on experiences in a variety of jobs, including taking part in any extra training available to all dining staff. “To me, when a student comes in here, it’s my job to help them grow,” Guiden said. “It’s my job to teach them, to try to push them as far as I can push them and to find out what they want to learn and then help them work through that.” As their co-op experiences come to an end, Guiden sits down with students to discuss their plans for the future. He has advised students continuing to culinary school and has helped co-op students enter the workforce right after McCann. OIT’s co-op program offers similar hands-on learning in the field. “Our co-op students have an opportunity to see how day
to day support of a large enterprise network is delivered,” said Senior Network and Systems Administrator Todd Gould. “Coop students are exposed to theoretical and practical networking principles and practices that run the gamut; from network switch configuration, ethernet jack repair, wireless access point deployment, network monitoring, cyber security practices to website development, the list of what a student will be exposed can be quite extensive.” The McCann program has also had important benefits in finding well-qualified dining staff as the College faces a large number of retirements among staff in the coming years. Klass noted that the importance of the McCann program came from “an understanding of how we could do multiple things at once, which is convince people who grew up here to stay here and convince people who were looking for a place to engage with this [culinary] work to think about higher education as a place they want to do it.” Five or six permanent members of the College’s current dining staff have come through the McCann program, according to Klass. Several have also gone on to the other culinary programs, such as the prestigious Culinary Institute of America. This continued growth, training and success is all part of the educational mission of the McCann co-op program. “It’s up to us to come in and get them an opportunity to teach them and help them grow,” Guiden said.
April 3, 2019
FEATURES 9
The Williams Record
WSC Kudos Program gives out monthly awards to recognize staff who go above and beyond By NIGEL JAFFE FEATURES EDITOR From corralling escaped horses on Mount Hope to providing elderly alumni with rain ponchos, staff at the College regularly perform acts of service that transcend the expectations set out in their job descriptions. The Williams Staff Committee (WSC) Kudos Program exists specifically to give exceptional deeds like these the recognition they deserve.
The idea behind the Kudos Program was first introduced by former Facilities staff member Patrick Banks at a WSC meeting in the fall of 2012. After a lengthy discussion, the plans were finalized at the November meeting, and awards have been given out on a monthly basis since January 2013. The WSC seeks nominations from the College community to recognize any staff member who has performed a specific action that goes above and
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE WILLIAMS STAFF COMMITTEE.
Todd Noyes in OIT received a Kudos award for January 2019.
beyond their job description. Each month’s winners, who range in number from one to four depending on the number of nominees who qualify, receive a certificate and a $50 Visa gift card. The awards are presented by Executive Assistant to the Dean of Faculty Justine Beringer and General Maintenance Technician Shaun Howland. Beringer said that presenting the award is one of her favorite aspects of the program. “The recipients often don’t know that they’ve been nominated, so it’s a surprise,” she said. “We show up, and they often think they’re in trouble at first, and then it turns into a fun thing. I always ask the supervisors to gather as many people as possible to be present when we give the award, so afterwards I get to talk to all the people who were there.” The opportunity to meet and speak with other staff is also valuable for Beringer. “The reason I volunteered for it is because I get to go all over campus and present these awards,” she said. “It’s really a great way to get to know staff and sometimes to hear some of what staff issues are. It has a double benefit: I get to bring joy to the person receiving the award, and it’s also a chance to hear what’s happening around campus and what the concerns are.” Though the rule of thumb is to give out two awards each month, they are distributed only to individuals who are nominated for actions that truly fulfill the guidelines of the
,
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Kudos Program. “It can be very difficult because a lot of the nominations are telling us how great people do their jobs,” Beringer said. “The nature of the Kudos, however, is that we give it when you do something beyond your job description.” One such example is the January 2019 winner, Office of Information Technology (OIT) Client Services Specialist Todd Noyes. He was nominated when another member of the OIT staff learned that Noyes frequently offered a visiting research scientist, Marcos Peñaloza-Murillo, rides home during especially snowy days. “I was really surprised, as I did not know I was nominated, and did not know it was coming,” Noyes said. “I was honored to be recognized for it.” Noyes also pointed out that there are many staff members who do exceptional things whose gestures go unrecognized. “I’m sure there are many staff, faculty and students who are doing great things every month – regardless of whether they were nominated or recognized under this program – that help make the Williams community better,” he said. To make sure all efforts are recognized, the committee has begun acknowledging both the nominees and the final winners. Regardless of whom the award goes to, the nominations for all candidates are posted online every month. “We feel bad because we want everyone to be recognized,” Beringer said. “Some of the submissions just glow and gush about
• Behind the scenes of the staff issue • Gym monitor Howard Garbarsky’s wild stories • The dulcet tones of WOC’s Dave Ackerson
Patricia Malanga received a Kudos award for February 2018. the individuals that they are nominating, how wonderful they are and how their lives are enriched because this person exists.” One of the goals of the Kudos Program is to have a tangible impact on both the individual level and for the staff as a whole. “I came to learn that this is a program that fosters a real communal spirit,” Beringer said. “Morale can be a little bit low, and it makes people feel good to know that there are others watching that appreciate when they go above and beyond.” The award has the potential to resonate deeply with the winner, as in the case of one of the February 2018 recipients, English department Academic Assistant Patricia Malanga. She received 16 Kudos nominations at once – each including an individual blurb
Members of the Record’s board wanted to extend our appreciation to some of the College staff who make our time here so extraordinary. “Deborah Flynn at the Health
“Sharif Rosen works tire-
“Irene Nesbitt is a kind,
Center is hands-down one of the kindest and most diligent people on this campus. It is clear that she genuinely cares about students and is willing to do whatever she can to help us feel better. While it is never pleasant to get sick in college, Deb makes it a lot more bearable.”
lessly to help students feel safe and deeply known. He is one of the most thoughtful individuals I’ve ever met, with an unwavering faith in people and their capacity to persevere. Thank you, Sharif, for counseling me through grief, growth and everything in between.”
warm presence in Mission Dining Hall. She makes an effort to get to know students, greeting many of us by name, genuinely asking how we are doing and offering us encouragement during particularly stressful weeks. It is a pleasure to know her – and to share a name with her!”
– Sofie Jones
– Lydia Duan
– Irene Loewenson
“ Lisa Armstrong is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. Working at Driscoll, I’ve seen firsthand just how wonderful she is: Her bright and upbeat attitude makes her a joy to be around.”
“I am always excited to see Mark LaPine’s kind and warm smile whenever I walk into Bernhard Music Center or Paresky, or when he is in the audience for a music performance in his free time. His care for students and Williams inspires me, and I am always heartened by his stories about his friends, family and love for Funkadelic. Mark, thank you for your compassion and positivity.”
“Dick Quinn shows incredible passion for his job and for Williams sports. Working for DQ as a Sports Information assistant, I have spent hours in his office listening to his stories about Ephs from years past. His care for his student employees is also heartening.”
“ Cyndi Haley in the Dean’s
Office is not only a joy to work with on the Honor Committee, but more importantly, her encouragement, support and good humor make every trip to the Dean’s Office a day-brightening experience. Thank you!”
williamsrecord.com or soundcloud.com/williamsrecord Have a story idea or want to host? Contact ret5@williams.edu
– Danny Jin
– Jeongyoon Han
“Deborah Morandi in the chemistry department is so lovely. She even makes picking up take-home exams happy – or at least not miserable!”
“Thank you to Rick Shand for making sure that East is so homey for all of us and for constantly battling the nasty ants!”
“I want to give a huge shoutout to Whitmans’ own Ada Moreno. Every time I see Ada, she gives me a huge smile and a “Hi, honey!” from behind the counter. Even at times when the stress of school starts to take a toll, Ada’s presence is a reassuring constant every time I eat at Paresky for lunch. Even during the midday rush, she always takes the time to say hello and ask about my day or how my family’s doing. More students should take the time to do the same.”
– Brooke Horowitch
– Haeon Yoon
– Jane Petersen
– Nicholas Goldrosen
“Dave Chapman is the most understanding custodian out there. I have informally moved into my common room, bringing my maelstrom-level disorganization with me. Regardless of my habits, he always greets me warmly, and I respect him immensely!” – Lily Goldberg
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describing her Kudos-worthy actions – which were submitted separately by almost every member of the English department. Many of the department faculty cited not only Malanga’s consistent and vital support for the department but also her teaching: She developed and taught a new Winter Study course in 2018 on art journaling. “I had no idea that this had been planned and was taken completely off guard when almost the entire department showed up in my office in the middle of the day to congratulate me,” Malanga said. Recently, she discovered that all of the nomination forms, complete with the blurbs, are posted on the WSC website. “Reading the wonderful things the faculty said about me was like getting the award all over again,” she said.
Kudos from the Record
– Nigel Jaffe
Here’s what you can hear about while walking to class or in line at Goodrich:
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE WILLIAMS STAFF COMMITTEE.
The Williams Record
10 ARTS
April 3, 2019
Howard Garbarsky: man, myth, monitor, screenwriter By REBECCA TAUBER EXECUTIVE EDITOR
by. I guess what it all comes down to is that I like doing creative things, whether it’s making a knife or making a film or writing a screenplay. I like creating things out of my experience, and I think to be a good writer you have to have a lot of different experiences to weave all that into a narrative.
Most students’ interactions with Athletic Facility Monitor Howard Garbarsky consist of a quick “thank you” when entering Lasell Gym or a jog back to the front desk for a forgotten swipe. When not scaring swipe-forgetters with his shrill whistle, Howard spends his time writing screenplays composing poetry and taking photos. I first learned of Howard’s artistic side this past fall at Yom Kippur break-fast dinner, and recently sat down with him again at the front desk of Lasell to discuss his upbringing, past jobs and current projects.
Rebecca: How did you start working at the College?
.
Rebecca: How did you get into screenwriting? Howard: I had an idea that I was trying to develop, and decided that the best way to get it made into a movie was to write it. I went back to MCLA [Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts] to become a screenwriter. I also joined an independent filmmakers group upstate in Albany in 1995 called the “Upstate Independent Filmmakers Network” (UIFN), and I eventually became the president of that, so it was kind of a dual thing where I did both at the same time: wanting to become an independent filmmaker and have my vision realized rather than depend on Hollywood to have my screenplays made. Rebecca: What was your original idea that inspired you to study screenwriting? Howard: My original idea was for a movie called “The Atomic Voles.” Voles are like large mice; they’re quite destructive around your garden, and they’re kind of cute too. They look like hamsters. I came up with the idea when I had some hamsters for pets at one point. When they stand up and look around, they look kind of like people if you have a great imagination. Rebecca: What’s the plot of “The Atomic Voles”? Howard: When a young prince from an alien planet stows aboard the first spaceship going to Earth, he discovers his planet has been sabotaged as part of a coup against
COURTESY OF HOWARD GABARSKY
Gym monitor Howard Garbarsky began working at the College while at studying at MCLA to write his screenplay, “The Atomic Voles.” his father. After his ship crash-lands on Earth, he has to fight to survive and get back to the planet in time to stop the coup and save his family. Rebecca: Are you working on any other projects? Howard: I have a lot of different things. I also wanted to tell a few other stories that I had. One of them was about my father, who was a prisoner of war in World War II [and] led 700 other prisoners of war out of the camp in northern Germany. He was captured in August of 1944 [in] France. He could speak Polish, Russian and German quite fluently, so he became a translator. What they didn’t know was that he was a Jew. Like myself, he’s a very stubborn guy; if he didn’t like what the Germans were saying, thought it was against the Geneva Convention, he would refuse to translate it, so he got beaten a lot for that. I think it’s a very compelling story.
about the Hebrew Farmer’s Association. They were one of several agricultural communities that were settled by the American branch of the Baron de Hirsch association. They would take people [from Europe] and bring them over here and guarantee mortgages for them because of the pogroms at the end of the 19th century in that area. Rebecca: Have any of your screenplays been performed or made into films? Howard: I ran a screenwriter’s group as part of an offshoot of UIFN for a number of years. We would do stuff like table reads, and then we also had this thing that Upstate did that was movies without pictures, where they did a table read of your screenplay with actors, so I’ve had my screenplays read. I haven’t had them made into a film; I’m hoping that my documentaries will get some notice and then I’ll get a chance to get some funding for some of my theatrical films.
Rebecca: Anything else? Howard: I’ve also been working on a documentary about the community my father came from, which was in southern Rensselaer County. It’s on the road between Pittsfield and Albany on Route 20, in an area that was settled as an agricultural community between the 1890s and 1950s. The documentary is
Rebecca: What was your line of work before you started screenwriting? Howard: I had a mail order cutlery company selling high end and custom-made knives. The first time I went to school after I got out of the Air Force, I took environmental studies and I took winter survival. We had 10 people, it was very cold
and we built a big trench fire and we were trying to gather as much wood as we could. I went and looked around and saw a standing red cherry tree, about 10 inches in diameter, and I tried to cut it down with my sheath knife. Very soon I realized that this knife was not designed for chopping. I had to use a small survival saw; it took me two hours to saw through this thing. All of a sudden, I got very interested in knives; this tree haunted me, it’s like one thing gets into my head and I have to figure it out, so eventually I started my own company. I had custom knife makers making knives for me. I designed a knife that would’ve done the job had I been able to have it at that point. I tried to have a couple of blade-smiths make it for me. But it still wasn’t right, so I found a local blacksmith and he gave me blade-smithing lessons and I made my own knife. I took a similar diameter piece of hickory and I chopped it in two in about two minutes with this thing, and that’s what got me interested in knives. Rebecca: What did you do in the Air Force before you began the knife business? Howard: When I was in high school my father had a catastrophic illness. He had surgery, he couldn’t work, so he had to sell his business. Basically, he had something like $60,000–$80,000 worth of
hospital bills because his insurance wouldn’t cover it, and everything that they had saved for my brother and myself to go to college had gone towards hospital bills. I was working as a photographer, I got laid off and I wanted to send money home to my parents. So, rather than going to college – I would have had to take out a bunch of loans – I went into the Air Force, and became a photographer. I would send half my paycheck home every two weeks. Rebecca: How did you get into photography? Howard: When I was in high school, I took an advanced workshop with this guy from Stockbridge who was very famous for his pictures of Tanglewood and Music Inn called Clemens Kalischer. He became like a mentor to me; he passed last year, unfortunately. The other photographers literally called me “The Kid,” because everybody else in the class was in their 30s and 40s. Rebecca: Do you do any other forms of art? Howard: I wrote several poems about growing up. One of my first poems was about listening to the trains; growing up, I never had an easy time falling asleep at night, so I used to listen to the trains going by and that would lull me to sleep, the clickity-clack sound of the rail carts going
Howard: When I started working at Williams, I decided to do something to make some money when I was going to school. I wasn’t really making any money selling knives, it was kind of hand to mouth. I was working part time here and going to school. I stayed because I had a lot of trouble when I started off writing. In my 40s I found out that I had ADD [Attention Deficit Disorder] and that I was dyslexic. I always had a hard time writing, I couldn’t spell, I really couldn’t order my thoughts very well to write things down. It was a real struggle for me, and I really wanted to become a writer. To get back to the tree thing here, once there’s something I get hung up on, and writing the story of “Atomic Voles” was something I got hung up on, I don’t quit. So, I decided I’d become a writer, hell or high water. Rebecca: How have your diagnoses of dyslexia and ADD affected your writing? Howard: I went and got an associate’s degree through the Air Force, the Community College of the Air Force, and one of the requirements was taking English composition. I had a hell of a time in English comp.: the first time I basically flunked out because I just couldn’t write a paragraph, I couldn’t write two paragraphs and put them together, I couldn’t write four paragraphs and make a page out of it. I found screenwriting to actually be a lot easier because it’s broken up and there’s different parts to it, and the more I practice screenwriting, the more my writing has improved, but it’s been a struggle. I think anything you have to struggle for is worthwhile, whether it’s chopping down a tree or writing a screenplay. Unless you’re really committed to it and you really latch onto it and really give it your all, you might get mediocre results. If you want excellence, you have to fight for it.
Jay Corey, videographer, films the College in a new light By PHILLIP PYLE ARTS EDITOR “It makes you have to think creatively about every single shot,” Jay Corey told me as he turned his iMac screen towards me. The screen was opened to Adobe Premiere Pro, Corey’s preferred video editing application. Corey, as the director of videography at the College, plans, shoots and edits the College’s videos. He even composes the music that underscores all his videos. Corey previously worked as the creative director of an advertising agency before taking a position at Johns Hopkins, where his videography career began. Corey began in a broad creative role at the hospital, which eventually morphed into a passion for video. “At the time, video editing started coming in-house, and industry standard settled as something you could do as your own, so I started doing more and more of that,” Corey said. “And about a year in, I was like, ‘We need a studio.’ And so, we built one. And in almost the blink of an eye, I was the video person.” Corey eventually became immersed in videography, constantly creating videos across different subject matter at Johns Hopkins. One of Corey’s advisors at Johns Hopkins, a graduate of the College, encouraged Corey to make the move to Williamstown. Five and a half years ago, Corey transitioned from
Johns Hopkins to Hopkins Hall; he recounted having immediately enjoyed the close-knit nature of the student community. While the College does not have massive studios around campus or a major dedicated solely to film production, Corey says students never fail to find him. “Since I’ve been here, it’s happened over and over again. When I was at Johns Hopkins, that never happened,” Corey said. “Since I’ve been at Williams, I’ve had a cluster of students come to me for guidance and every one of them has been like a knock on the door. It’s fantastic.” This is how Corey began working with Jamal Meneide ’19 and Joey Mullen ’19, filmmakers profiled in the March 6 issue of the Record, as well as Aniah Price ’22, a photo editor for the Record. The students showed interest and approached him, Corey said, and he never fails to be impressed by the initiative and video skills of the College’s students. Our conversation floated from expressing our frustrations with Final Cut Pro X and the transition, to editing in Premiere Pro, to his current projects at the College. Eventually, we found ourselves talking about our favorite movies from the past year. We discussed The Favourite, Paul Schrader, Roma and the genius of Spike Lee, one of his favor-
ANIAH PRICE/PHOTO EDITOR.
Director of Videography Jay Corey pursues inventive and creative projects about College life, including the “Shot a Day” initiative. ite directors and the inspiration for many noted stylistic techniques, most notably the infamous Spike Lee dolly zoom. Corey showed me his recent videography, including a video for the Office of Admission, a video about the history of the College’s school song, “The Mountains” and a video shot after the opening of the newly renovated Sawyer Library. What truly came through in all these videos, though, was Corey’s impeccable attention to detail. He meticulously scopes out every angle and
diligently edits every clip, ensuring that each video is his best work. Despite now living in a much smaller environment than Johns Hopkins, Corey has found that the College still provides a plethora of videography opportunities. Being the only school videographer gives him the freedom to really choose the projects he works on. This allows him to explore his own creative interests while simultaneously working with students. The “Shot a Day” project, which is one shot every day
for the academic year, for instance, was something that Corey had the idea for. Those looking for Corey can likely find him searching around campus every day, looking for that interesting and visually engaging shot at a dance performance, in the classroom or on Spring Street. He wants to encapsulate the College from as many perspectives, or days, as possible through these inventive shots. “I was worried I would not have enough to do here,” said Corey, “but I haven’t found that to be the case.
The small environment, geographically speaking, actually forces me to be more unique in my approaches. I cannot create new spaces, so I have to think of new ways to show things on campus. I have to be creative every day, which I love.” The next time you watch a Mountain Day video, fundraising campaign video or drone footage of the College, make sure to note the ambitious attention to detail, original score and innovative cinematography Corey employs in all that he creates.
April 3, 2019
STAFF ISSUE 11
The Williams Record
Staff at Williams – An Overview Williams employs the full-time equivalent of 856 staff members: 411 administrative staff and 445 support staff. Administrative staff perform tasks that are “executive,” “administrative ”
or
“profes-
sional” in nature, according to federal law. Administrative staff are salaried; support staff are paid hourly.
Staff Compensation
Staff Demographics
For Fiscal Year 2017
As of November 2017
$883,168
Support Staff
Highest Total Staff Compensation
Current Staff Minimum Wage at the College (40 hr./wk.)
$31,200 Administrative Staff
$54,095
Median Staff Compensation
Sample Average Hourly Wages Dining Services Dishwasher........................$17.88 Snack Bar Attendant..........$16.32 Cook.................................$22.86
Support Staff
Admin. Staff
Facilities Custodian..........................$20.46 Groundskeeper...................$24.32 Clerical/Technical Administrative Dept...........$21.71 Academic Dept...................$23.32
The information presented here is drawn from data from the Provost’s Office, Committee on Priorities and Resources and the College’s tax documents. Infographics by Nicholas Goldrosen, Managing Editor
12 SPORTS
The Williams Record
April 3, 2019
Zamboni driver Jimmy Menard talks rinkside at NESCACs By JACK McGOVERN SPORTS EDITOR
ANIAH PRICE/PHOTO EDITOR
In his job as a custodian, Andy Briggs works to make Pratt a home away from home for first-year residents.
Superfan Andy Briggs supports students on and off the field By JACK McGOVERN SPORTS EDITOR Andy Briggs is a familiar presence to those who live in the Pratt section of Mission, where, as a custodian, he plays an integral role for first-year students in easing their transition to life at the College. Briggs introduces himself to every Pratt first-year on move-in day, when he teaches them how to raise and lower their bed frames and often meets their parents. In the days after, he works to quickly learn all their names. He is well known on campus for his efforts to make Pratt a home away from home. What many do not know, however, is that this extends well beyond the workweek at Mission Park. On weekends, he is a regular at Cole Field. And Chandler Gymnasium. And Lansing Chapman Rink. And even the Samuelson-Muir Pool. Briggs, who is in his 12th year at the College, is a dedicated Eph sports fan. In following the athletic careers of his current and former Pratt residents, he has attended an event of almost every varsity team. “I mainly keep up with the Pratt kids, but I get to know everybody,” Briggs said. While his favorites include popular spectator sports like soccer, football, basketball and ice hockey, Briggs has also checked out squash matches and traveled to Lake Onota in Pittsfield for a crew regatta. “I go to them all,” he laughed. Especially for first-years at Mission who are living and competing in a new place, Briggs’ attendance is about much more than athletics. “Andy is a great fan of Williams athletics and not just because he goes to a lot of athletic contests, but in how supportive of the Eph athletes he is because he gets to know them outside of the realm of athletic competition,” said Sports Information Director Dick Quinn. A resident of Adams, Briggs started going to games in the area to watch his children, who were standout high school and college athletes. “My children played sports so I went to their sporting events,” Briggs said. “My son played baseball at Southern Vermont College, and my daughter played soccer at Bay Path College.”
When he started working at the College, Briggs — who describes himself as a naturally social person — quickly connected with students. “I know when kids come through the dining hall, if they don’t look familiar, you can tell they were never down at Mission Park,” Briggs said. “I mean we’re down here six and half hours a day plus during lunch, so you know which kids are down here.” Through his relationships with students, Briggs began to come out for more events. “I went sporadically to Williams games [before] anyways, [but] not like I do now,” he said. Since coming to the College, he has also supported Pratt first-years at a cappella concerts and theatre productions. “He genuinely cares about the Eph athletes as people first and athletes second and I am convinced that is why he has such a great relationship with so many of the athletes,” Quinn said. “They know he cares about them.” Because the first-year dorms host prospective students for Windows on Williams, recruiting trips and Previews, Briggs sometimes meets future students before they even enroll at the College. Former basketball star Michael Mayer ’14, a 6-foot9 All-America center who later played professionally in Spain, was one such student. “I believe the coach invited him up to come look at the College and he was so big [he] tried laying on these couches and it didn’t work!” Briggs said. “So I went back the next day and [he] ended up sleeping on the floor.” When Mayer came back for his first year at the College, Briggs said he found more suitable sleeping arrangements. “He was in the first room up in Armstrong,” Briggs remembered. “He had to duck his head to get through the door.” Briggs said his favorite team was the first national champion women’s soccer team in 2015. After the Ephs fell short in a shootout in the previous year’s championship game, the women went en route to the NCAA title. Already an enthusiastic supporter, Briggs followed the team closely that season through windy and rainy conditions. He got to know many players on the team, as well as their parents, from his time on the side-
lines at Cole Field. When the team advanced to the Final Four in the NCAA tournament, Briggs streamed the game. “I didn’t go [to the championship round in Kansas City, Missouri] but [I was] watching it online,” he remembered. The team was led by the star forward tandem of Audrey Thomas ’17 and Kristi Kirshe ’17, the all-time program leader in goals who recently debuted for the United States national rugby sevens team. “Between the two of them, they were phenomenal,” Briggs said. “I think [they were] the best duo I’ve ever seen.” Briggs even gave Thomas her own nickname. “I said, ‘I got a nickname for you,’ and I said, ‘Pest’ and she kind of got upset with me about that. I said, ‘I mean it in a good way because you are down there, you got all the defenders looking at you and you got them so mad, they can’t keep up with you and Kirshe!’” Briggs recalled the 2013–14 NESCAC title-winning women’s ice hockey team as another favorite. Christina Bravi ’14, who was a Junior Advisor in Armstrong-Pratt, starred for the team and took home NESCAC honors along with her coach and first-year teammate. “She got player of the year, [head coach Meghan Gillis] got coach of the year and then [Hanna Beattie ’17] got the rookie of the year,” he said. The women finished 15– 10–3 and defeated Trinity, Connecticut College and Bowdoin to clinch an automatic berth in the NCAA tournament. That year, the Ephs lost to SUNY Plattsburgh in the opening round of NCAAs, falling short of their first victory in a national tournament. Briggs therefore felt the significance when the 2018–19 team accomplished the feat with a 3-1 win over Norwich at Lansing Chapman Rink on March 6. “This time, they won a game in the NCAAs,” Briggs said. “I was at the NCAA game.” There through the highs and lows of long seasons, the team milestone and the individual accolades, Briggs is always a friendly face at home games for his Pratt students and JAs. “I think I like it because you get kids that, you know, like to see someone in the stands that they know, cheering for them,” he said. “My daughter said that it meant a lot to her.”
It takes a lot of behind-thescenes preparation to get facilities ready for Eph sports teams to shine. The groundskeeping staff work day and night, rain or shine to make sure the College’s fields, courts and rink are in top shape. One such groundskeeper is Jimmy Menard, who drives the Zamboni ice resurfacer before hockey games. Sports Editor Jack McGovern ’21 interviewed Menard in between periods at the women’s hockey NESCAC Championship at Lansing Chapman Rink. The women defeated Amherst and later knocked off Middlebury to win the conference title. McGovern: How did you get into driving the Zamboni? Menard: All of the athletics personnel cover all the
sports year-round, and we all are qualified to run the Zamboni and maintain the rink maintenance and custodial work along with the facilities and the locker rooms and everything. One neat thing, though, [was] back on campus when they had the Human Library [a program that allowed members of the community to be “checked out” for a conversation]. I went and explained the mechanics … because just everybody loves the Zamboni and the kids were shown really what it’s about. McGovern: What goes into learning how to drive and operate the Zamboni? Is it pretty simple? Menard: It is, honestly. Everyone’s probably nervous at first but you just don’t throw them out there. Start on, don’t put any application of water. Just get them used to running the machine
to start off, get comfortable and then, gotta learn! McGovern: Any interesting stories? Menard: Through the years, probably the worst incident [that occurs is when] maybe accidentally you didn’t lift the conditioner high enough and you cut into the ice when you’re coming off the exit. You’ll take the threshold out, which happens. McGovern: Do students ever throw anything onto the ice? Menard: Years ago they did. Honestly, I’m in my 34th year at Williams, and things are controlled a little more with athletic events compared to what [they] used to be. I’ve seen kids throw squids, fish, things in the past. I’m glad they don’t [anymore] because it interrupts play and they [have to] get it off the surface.
Tammy Wright reflects on team scheduling, holiday gift drive By SOFIE JONES SPORTS EDITOR In her official job at the College, Tammy Wright keeps Eph athletics moving from her third floor Lasell office. As the travel coordinator and team scheduler, Wright determines team travel plans, books hotel rooms for team trips, orchestrates home game schedules and handles the contracts of game officials. Wright’s role at the College, however, goes further than this. Wright, a North Adams, Massachusetts native who has been at the College since 1990, also created and runs the athletic department’s annual fundraiser for Berkshire County’s Hillcrest Educational Centers. Hillcrest is a notfor-profit organization that offers residential programs for youth with psychiatric or behavioral disorders. While in her fifth of now 29 years at the College, Wright started a toy drive that donated to a few different local nonprofits. Then, she saw an article about Hillcrest. “I reached out to them and now we have been working with them for 18 years,” she said.
Every December, Wright works with athletics staff, coaches and students to raise money to purchase holiday gifts for the children at Hillcrest. Last year, they raised enough money to purchase over 150 “tags” worth of presents. Each tag represents around $25 and corresponds to a present that one of the children at Hillcrest has asked for. “It’s amazing,” Wright said of the effort. “I think it is an eye-opener to a lot of people who participate when they see [requests] coming through for just batteries or a pair of socks.” After the gifts are purchased, whether by Wright, coaches or students, the department hosts a presentwrapping party. The gifts are then brought down to the organization’s five centers between Lenox and Pittsfield. In 2004, in the program’s fourth year, Wright and the athletics department received an award from Hillcrest for their donations and support. “That has been a blessing for me,” Wright said. “To be able to do this for those kids.”
As the annual fundraiser approaches its 20th anniversary in 2020, Wright said she feels confident that it is not ending anytime soon. “As long as I’m here, I’ll do it,” she said. “Then hopefully, I’ll pass it on to somebody.” Wright attributes the idea’s success to how involved athletics teams have been. “I know that they see that it is such a great cause,” she said. “Our teams are very active in supportive roles throughout the community, but this one seems to be unique in that it is across the whole department.” This interconnectedness is typical for Wright, who, in her role as scheduler, is used to working with every part of the athletics department. Arranging travel accommodations for the College’s 32 varsity teams, many of which often advance to lastminute tournaments such as Nationals, requires it. “I love my job. I love it, every aspect, but your mind does scramble quite a bit,” Wright said. “It’s very stressful at times, but if I didn’t love my job, I wouldn’t have lasted this long.”
ANIAH PRICE/PHOTO EDITOR
Athletics’ travel coordinator and team scheduler Tammy Wright is in her 29th year at the College.
Games of the Week Wednesday April 3
Women’s lacrosse vs. Tufts Home, 6 p.m.
Saturday April 6
Track and field at Amherst
Softball at Middlebury
Away, 11 a.m.
Away, 12 p.m. and 2 p.m. Baseball vs. Amherst
Women's crew at William Smith
Home, 1 p.m. and 3 p.m.
Away
Softball vs. Skidmore
Men’s lacrosse at Tufts
Home, 4 p.m. and 6 p.m.
Men's tennis vs. Connecticut College
Women's tennis vs. Connecticut College
Away, 6 p.m.
Home, 10 a.m.
Home, 2 p.m.
Men's crew at Tufts and Coast Guard Academy Away