Williams College: Encyclopedia II - Williams College - Distinguishing features

Williams College - Distinguishing features

Williams College - School colors and origins thereof

Williams's primary school color is purple.

The story goes that at the Williams-Harvard baseball game in 1869, spectators, watching from carriages, had trouble telling the teams apart (there were no uniforms) so one of the onlookers bought ribbons from a nearby millinery store to pin on Williams' players. The only color available was purple. The buyer was Jennie Jerome (later Winston Churchill's mother) whose family summered in Williamstown.

Williams's other color is gold, purple's complementary color, which is why most team uniforms and paraphernalia have purple and a form of gold or yellow as the two dominant colors.

Williams College - Purple cow

The Williams college mascot, formally established by a vote of the student body in 1907, is a purple cow. This peculiar mascot has several possible sources:

- Gelett Burgess's nonsense poem (the original is in the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA):

I never saw a purple cow
Nor do I hope to see one;
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I'd rather see than be one.

- Another possible source of the mascot is the color of the surrounding mountains, which often appear purple in the light of the setting sun (but which don't really resemble cows).

- A humor magazine in the early 20th Century was named "The Purple Cow."

According to a caption on a photograph at the Williamstown House of Local History, the purple cow may have come from a student prank: a farmer always left his cow staked near Weston Field, and several students painted the cow purple.

Williams College - Alma mater

Williams claims the first alma mater song written by an undergraduate, "The Mountains", which was written by Washington Gladden of the class of 1859.

Williams College - Student media

There are several Williams publications produced by students each year. The longest running student newspaper is the Williams Record which is a weekly broadsheet paper produced every Wednesday. Several other newspapers have been founded over the years, but none have survived as long as the Record.

The student yearbook is called the Gulielmensian (named after the Latin word for Williams). It has been irregularly published in the past decade, but dates back to the mid 19th century.

Numerous smaller campus publications of a literary nature are also produced each year, including a campus humor magazine and collections of poetry.

WCFM Williamstown 91.9 broadcasts from new offices in Prospect Hall at 1.1 kilowatts, reaching most of the Berkshire area. As the campus radio station, it is commercial and format free, leaving DJs to program as they wish. It also occasionally broadcasts Williams sporting events and hosts campus concerts. An online feed makes WCFM available to listeners worldwide.

Williams College - Williams Trivia

At the end of every semester since 1966, the Williams College radio station has hosted an all-night, eight-hour trivia contest. Teams of students, alumni, professors, friends and others compete to answer questions on any number of subjects, identify songs, and perform a variety of unnecessary tasks. The winning team's only prize is the obligation to create and host the following semester's contest.

The precise date of the debut contest is uncertain. Most spring contests occur in early May, but during its first decade, Williams Trivia was sometimes held in March or February. Assuming a May date, Lawrence University's Great Midwest Trivia Contest, first held on April 29, 1966, would be the oldest continuous competition of its sort in the United States. But if the first Williams contest was held earlier, it would be the oldest. The distinction is appropriately trivial.

While other college-based trivia contests in the United States tend to emphasize marathon endurance and revel in the obscurity of their material, the aim of the Williams contest is to cram as much entertaining material into a concentrated space as possible. Over the years the Williams Trivia contest has generally adhered to the credo of its founder, Frank Ferry: "We don't deal in minutia, which may be defined as useless facts with no emotional value. Trivia concerns something you know but can't quite remember."

Despite lasting just eight hours (compared with the weekend-long contests on other campuses), a typical Williams Trivia contest will demand between 900 and 1,200 separate "bits" of trivial information in eight hours, delivering twice as much content as its "competitors" in a fraction of the time. Williams Trivia is also conducted twice a year, so the amount of fresh material needed to sustain the contest from generation to generation is great. However, it should be noted that no discernable rivalry exists between any of the various contests.

As the above math indicates, a distinctive element of William Trivia is the complexity of play. Typically, at any given point in the proceedings, a team will be simultaneously answering a question, identifying a song, answering two concurrent bonuses on specific topics (these can be textual, visual, or audio), preparing or performing an in-studio "Action Trivia" performance, and considering clues from an eight-hour-long thematic bonus, with a staggered series of deadlines. It is for this reason that large teams have a substantial advantage, and experienced teams even more so. To date, only three freshman teams have won the contest. The smallest team to win was only 8 players, but this occurred in 1980; because the contest's manifold nature has since increased, such a feat is exceedingly unlikely today. A one-person team once managed to reach 5th place. In 2005, the first entirely off-campus team managed to win the contest while playing remotely. Still, many teams do not seek the championship trophy. One such team, "The Manhattan Skyliners," has played from 1972 to the present without ever having won.

The contest has occasionally received outside media coverage, including in the Sunday New York Times. Further history and details are available at an archival website.

Williams College - The Old Hopkins Observatory

Williams College is the site of the Hopkins Observatory, the oldest extant astronomical observatory in the United States. Erected in 1836-1838, it now contains the Mehlin Museum of Astronomy, including Alvan Clark's first telescope (from 1852) and the Milham Planetarium, which uses a Zeiss Skymaster ZKP3/B optomechanical projector and an Ansible digital projector, both installed in 2005. The Hopkins Observatory's 0.6-m DFM reflecting telescope (1991) is installed elsewhere on the campus. Williams joins with Wellesley, Wesleyan, Middlebury, Colgate, Vassar, Swarthmore, and Haverford/Bryn Mawr to form the Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium, sponsored for over a decade by the Keck Foundation and now with its student research programs sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

Williams College - Williams College Museum of Art

The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) is one of the best college art museums in the country. With over 12,000 works (only a fraction of which are displayed at any one time) in its permanent collection, it serves as a great educational resource for both undergraduates and students in the graduate art history program.

The collection is incredibly eclectic, featuring both Eastern and Western art, from the ancient world to the contemporary scene. Many different media are represented, including painting, sculpture, photography, and video.

Notable works include "Morning in a City" by Edward Hopper, a commissioned wall painting by Sol LeWitt, and a commissioned outdoor sculpture and landscape work by Louise Bourgeois titled "Eyes".

The museum also contains the largest collection of works by brothers Charles Prendergast and Maurice Prendergast. The collection was donated by Eugénie Van Kimmel Prendergast, Charles's widow, and includes documents and other archival materials, in addition to over 400 works of art by the two brothers.

Though often overshadowed by the neighboring and much larger Clark Art Institute and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMoCA), WCMA remains one of the premier attractions of The Berkshires. Because the museum is intended primarily for educational purposes, admission is free for all.

Williams College - Chapin Library

The Chapin Library is a collection that supports the liberal arts curriculum of the college by allowing students close access to a number of rare books and documents of interest. It is unusual for one of the nation's major rare book collections to be in an undergraduate institution.

The library opened on June 18, 1923, with an initial collection of 9,000 volumes contributed by alumnus Alfred Clark Chapin, Class of 1869. Over the years, Chapin Library has grown to include over 50,000 volumes (including 3,000 more given by Chapin) as well as 100,000 other artifacts such as prints, photographs, maps, and bookplates.

The most famous items in the library's collection include the founding documents of the United States of America. These include first printings of the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, United States Constitution, and Bill of Rights, as well as George Washington's personal copy of the Federalist Papers. Other notable objects include a range of books, letters, and miscellaneous items relating to Theodore Roosevelt, who was a friend and, at one point, colleague of Chapin in the New York State Assembly.

The Chapin Library's science collection includes a first edition of Copernicus's De Revolutionibus (1543) as well as first editions of books by Tycho, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and other major figures.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Distinguishing features", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki