----[Bites]

Todd Rogers (Co-President) opened the meeting by encouraging members to use open time and follow up with projects like Kristen Sullivan (Mark Hopkins) has with the binge drinking problems, and Benjamin Finholt (Off-Campus) on the sailing club. Apparently Finny, after being refused meetings with various members of the administration, has taken to just busting into their offices and demanding to be heard. Congratulations, Finny – that’s the kind of initiative we like to see.

Ami Parekh (Co-President) reminded council that the New York Times is being delivered daily, and if anyone has any suggestions, comments, or complaints, please send feedback to jp at 03jep. There are also surveys in Baxter all this week, replete with snacks as incentives, so please fill those out. Ami also thanked the appointments committee and everyone who nominated themselves for a committee – there were some really great self-noms, and the appointments committee spent twelve hours going over all of them.

Todd congratulated Peter Munoz and Samee Ahmed for winning the MinCo elections for co-presidents. Mike Fluellen was elected Secretary. There’s an inter-ethnic potluck this Saturday, and Todd wants to get council members to go to the dinner.

----[The Bouncing Budget]

Ryan Mayhew announced that Council has $2800 less this week than last week because we had a negative balance from last year on the shuttle service (the one that goes to stop and shop and Wal-Mart). B&G just figured this out on Tuesday. Hopefully the controller’s office will update those budget sheets so that they appear in English, instead of Esperanto. At any rate, before the budget allocations of the meeting, College Council had $1,691.74.

----[Funding]

Tim Menza came from the Lehman Community Council to ask for $298.30 to cover their debts because of money confusions. Their College Council vouchers didn’t get processed for 4-6 weeks, and the group never got an accurate picture of the amount of money in their account. Tim had assumed the vouchers went through, when they actually hadn’t been processed yet. There was some discussion about whether this funding should happen now considering council’s current financial state. James Moorhead (Class of 2001) said that it is shameful we fund the Log for entertainment and wouldn’t fund a community service council. In the end, Council voted to give them the money: 27-0-0.

Indigenous Voices, a Native-American group on campus that puts on the Pow-Wow every fall, asked for money to go on two field trips to Dartmouth for a Pow-Wow and a meeting. Liz Hoover said that it is important that they go to these Pow-Wows to see how they’re run so that we can get some ideas about how to run our own better. These field trips are open the entire campus; email 01emh for more information. Council voted to give $100 to Indigenous Voices: 22-2-2

Matt Wessler came from WOC to ask for some extra money to cover their spring speaker. Usually, WOC has enough money to fully fund two speakers per year, but their fall speaker was really expensive and cost more than usual. Finny was concerned that we funded them at the beginning of the year for this, and we shouldn’t have to compensate for bad budgeting. Someone asked about alternate funding sources: Matt said that he’d asked several places, but all were out of money. Finny believes that Council already does a bad job allocating funding, and we shouldn’t encourage the same behavior from other student groups. Council voted to fund $200: 13-11-2

-----[In Defense of Political Science]

Abid Shah (Pratt) introduced our guests by reminding council that Max Weinstein came to council two weeks ago to announce that the CEP had been investigating different departments and their attitudes toward class size. According to the CEP, some departments, like Psychology, are working towards truth in information about class sizes, and others, like Political Science, are not. For instance, most Political Science classes in the course bulletin for 2000-2001 are marked as "Lecture/Discussion," which doesn’t say much about the format. Abid also remarked that he believes the general consensus on campus is a desire for larger introductory classes, and smaller classes at 300 and 400 levels capped at 20-25.

Cathy Johnson (Chair of the Political Science Department) defended her department’s decisions about course descriptions in the class bulletin. First of all, CEP’s suggestion was simply that – a suggestion. So she decided to follow some ideas in the suggestion, including marking all classes with a format, although in most cases, this format is simply "Lecture/Discussion." There are some seminars in the department (5 senior seminars, 2 freshman seminars) that are capped. And although the Lecture/Discussion designation has been derided, Prof. Johnson defended the measure, saying that sometimes a professor wants to have a discussion, but no student will talk, and sometimes the professor wants to lecture, and it turns into a discussion. So the classes really are Lecture/Discussion classes.

In addition, next year, the suggestions that CEP has made about including expected enrollment and maximum enrollment will be included, because the faculty voted them into the rules. However, Johnson does not think that this is going to be that great for students. The main problem is that she thinks she’ll be pulling numbers out of thin air. She believes that predicting the sizes of Political Science courses is similar to picking out what the weather will be a year from now. Why is this only a problem for the Political Science department? Well, it’s a large department, so there are more classes, and more students. If classes are artificially capped as seminars, and others are designated lectures, but they pick the wrong classes in the wrong designations, the department won’t teach as many students. But the college wants 100-125 students per full-time-equivalent professor (teaching 5 classes a year). Secondly, enrollments are unpredictable, and this is especially true in this department because nobody knows when an intern will end up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Professor James McAllister says that he could cap classes, but that would be providing a disservice to all the students who want to take his classes. He believes that professors who do cap classes may be doing so "artificially," and are the "bad guys." Because 140 students want to take his intro classes, and because he lets them all in, he is taking the burden of supplying those students with classes that the other departments are shirking. For him, Political Science is the hero.

Finny said that he has enjoyed taking large classes in the Political Science department, but he’s concerned that the department didn’t even try to give the enrollment guesses for most of their classes this year. Johnson replied that if you don’t want to be in a super-large class, don’t enroll in that class. Shenil Saya (Campus At-Large) asked why a department would have two pretty large sections of a class instead of one huge section when that would allow a professor to teach a different class. Johnson explained that in order to protect the professor’s workload, they give profs two of the same course to teach to make the workload easier. Three courses with two preparations is a tremendous amount of work.

Mayo Shattuck (Class of 2003) questioned the assumption that smaller classes are better. He likes McAllister’s 35-member class because there are a wider variety of views in the room than would exist in a smaller class. Elizabeth Moulton (Prospect) asked about Political Science classes that are at the 300 level – how many are there? According to Johnson, this year there were five in the fall, and nine in the spring, with a target size of 25.

Professor Johnson concluded by saying that, while the department will follow the new guidelines for the 2001-2002 catalog, the guesses will probably be just that – guesses. If you have any questions for her, feel free to email Cathy.M.Johnson@williams.edu

----[Open Time]

James Moorhead would like draft beer in the snack bar, and will be going to talk to dining services about this. Imagine – now you could buy a beer with breakfast points. Ed Rossier concurred, saying that the more sources of alcohol at Williams College, the less likely we’ll going to have a fascist state.

There is now an option at Jesup where you can use scrap paper to print on (lw-jesup-204 is the printer).

Joe Masters (Secretary) announced that he is working on getting Security to consider seniority in parking spaces. Next week, he will bring a proposal for approval that suggests the following system: Security will take all those applications taking in the first hour, and sort them first by class year, and then by time. So parking spaces will be given to Seniors first, as long as they get the applications submitted in the first hour. This policy should only affect a couple lots in campus, including Tyler, Weston, and some of the row house lots. If you have any comments or suggestions on the proposal, please email 02jtm.

Gus Howard (Morgan/Lehman) brought up the issue of police walkthroughs at Williams. He feels that Council needs to open a dialogue about a potential police state. Rob Sica suggested that Dave Boyer come next week to talk about it. According to Ami, nothing has been clarified yet. Police can’t walk through dorms, and probably won’t be able to walk through dorms. It was almost a "slip of the words" that came out at the housing committee meeting. Ben Katz (Editor-in-Chief of the Record) told us that this initiative actually comes from Security, and Nancy Walworth (Perry, Bascom, Chadbourne, Brooks) explained that the suggestion stems from Security trying to build better relations with the WPD.

Hall is going on the record saying he’s not turning 21 until April of his junior year, and he would leave the school if this system went in place.

Phil Swisher (Bryant, President of Housing Committee) passed out slips about TIPs training for all incoming freshmen. The idea would be to warn them about the liability issues concerning drinking. Ami asked if this was going to be a pared down version of TIPs training, because sitting through four hours of TIPs training is not exactly fun time. Phil said that the details haven’t been worked out. Nancy believes that we need to be serious about the mandatoriness of this training. If the college really takes a stand, and is harsh about it (including penalties), then it could really do some good.

Medha Khirtane came to say that today (Thursday) is Take Back The Night, at 9pm on Chapin steps. The event is sponsored by the womens and gender studies departments. There will be stories, talking, and performances.

----[CUSP]

Carrie Ryan brought changes on the CUSP proposal to campus. CUSP seeks to coordinate events in social spaces on campus. One such change is that CUSP will work with groups to make compromises. Also, there were lots of fears that CUSP was going to come in and start changing day-to-day policies, and many changes were made to alleviate those fears. James said that he’s been involved with the project with the beginning, and that it needs to be discussed more with the committees before Council gives its approval. Nishant would like the approval of SAC, Goodrich, the Housing Committee and the Log Committee before we vote on it, because those groups are affected the most by the proposal. Council decided to table the discussion and wait to approve the proposal: 25-0-4.

----[Appointments Committee]

Carrie wrote an editorial in this week’s Record addressing some of the problems she sees with the current Appointments Committee process. Basically, she believes that the chairs of student-faculty committees should be able to read the self-nominations, and talk about each and make recommendations about the nominees. After discussing the nominations, the chair would leave, and let the committee discuss more and voted. For Carrie, a member of a group reading nominations would have insights into the group that members of the appointments committee would not have, outweighing any disadvantages that would come from "swaying" the committee toward picking the type of people current on the committee. Shenil thinks that there would be a fundamental bias coming in from senior members. James believes that having senior members reading self-nominations would reduce creativity in the appointments committee.

----[Appointment Committee Approvals]

The appointments committee met for twelve hours on Sunday, reading self-nominations for committees, and presented their recommendations on which students should serve on which student-faculty committees. Council was then asked to approve the list or tell the committee what to change or reconsider. We approved the committee’s selections 21-1-6. If you would like to see who was appointed to what committee, please visit the college council web site at http://wso.williams.edu/cc.

----[Opinions]

There were three anti-Napster opinions sent to Mayo.

Two students who park in the Weston lot couldn’t find spaces during a weekend game, and were upset that parents and alums don’t get ticketed for parking in student spaces, but students will get ticketed when they are forced to park elsewhere. Forwarded to the Safety Committee.

There was a suggestion for more newspaper racks for the New York Times, forwarded to JP (03jep).

Two students didn’t want the BGLTU banners hanging from Baxter, because they feel it "creates a bad impression about the school." Sent to Todd.

Someone wanted to know who on CC is dealing with drinking problems on campus. Kristen Sullivan is, and if you have any questions/suggestions/comments, email 01kds.

A suggestion for getting mission wired for cable this summer, instead of next summer was forwarded to Tom McEvoy.

A student would like the lower mission lot to be paved to solve the horrendous problem of driving over trenches. Sent to the Safety Committee.

----[SAC]

----[Notes from the Secretary]

Joe Masters

Council Secretary

wso.williams.edu/cc