<p>Glorious day in Williamstown on Saturday. Lacross matches, golf tourny, singing groups performing, and guess what? half of the participants were women. No signs of protest. They do seem concerned about Irag, the Presidential election, greenness, the economy and a host of other issues. Not for everyone though. Phili is your best bet in my opinion.</p>
<p>Hi I'm a prospective applicant, and I came across this at the EphBlog:</p>
<p>*
Having just returned from a Williams Preview, and seeing the way women are degraded in quote boards in common rooms, my guess is that this idea [Claiming Williams] has no chance of flying. I wonder what “everyone at Williams needs to be open-minded” means in this context? If it means that you are supposed to stand up against racist speech but be indifferent to explicit sexual degradation, then I can’t see how it really promotes open-mindedness.*</p>
<p>*
I don’t understand why talking about sexism makes some of us so nervous. We seem to be doing okay in discussing racism: the conversation has been contentious, arduous and, frankly ugly, but at least it’s happening. When you talk about racism, it seems, you’re being brave by taking a stand on a serious problem; when you talk about sexism, you’re a crazy feminist or a shrew.*</p>
<p>Williams</a> Record - Latest Edition: March 12, 2008</p>
<p>I'm concerned that Williams is a bit homogeneous...</p>
<p>st.arnie - those are the views of two people, one Williams student and one prospective student. i don't doubt their concerns, but the reality is much, much more complex than you will get from the anecdotes of only two people, one of them not even a current student. i'd recommend reading the responses to the ephblog post, as well as the [wso</a> (williams students online) discussion thread](<a href="http://wso.williams.edu/discuss/comments.php?DiscussionID=1411%5C%5Dwso">http://wso.williams.edu/discuss/comments.php?DiscussionID=1411\) featuring (among other things) student responses to the Record article, for a more balanced selection of views. (although still not a perfectly representative selection, since ephblog is mostly alums who don't know what they're talking about, and only a small subset of the student body posts on WSO)</p>
<p>I think, in general, it's accurate to say that since the criteria for Williams admissions don't include personal characteristics in a direct way, we get a pretty broad sampling of society at large. That means jocks and nerds, alcoholics and teatotallers, feminists and misogynists, etc. Some of us take WGST classes and write papers decrying the ubiquity of phallic imagery in our male-dominated world; others enjoy getting drunk and drawing pictures of dicks on people's doors. This is probably true to some extent at every school, but maybe here more than some others specifically because the school makes such an effort to get kids from diverse backgrounds. When you have such a broad collection of different ideas on what the campus culture should be, you're bound to get some conflict, and I think that's what's showing up in the articles you mention. So I don't think it's necessarily a sign of homogeneity that we have these kinds of issues; in fact, in some ways it's the opposite. Of course, whether that's good or bad is up to you, but you should probably visit, maybe spend a night, and talk to students before you decide to write off Williams for perceived cultural reasons.</p>