Williams College
Williams College is a private liberal arts college in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It was established as a men's college in 1793 with funds from the estate of Ephraim Williams, a colonist from the Province of Massachusetts Bay who was killed in the French and Indian War in 1755.
This article is about the college in Williamstown, Massachusetts. For other uses, see Williams College (disambiguation).Motto
E liberalitate E. Williams, armigeri (Latin)
"Through the Generosity of E. Williams, Esquire"
1793
$3.53 billion (2022)[1]
$279.9 million[1]
Eiko Maruko Siniawer
360 (2021)[2]
2,171 (2021)[2]
2,121 (2021)[2]
50 (2021)[2]
Rural, college town, 450 acres (180 ha)
Purple & gold[3]
Ephelia, the Purple Cow[4]
Williams's main campus is located in Williamstown, in the Berkshires in rural northwestern Massachusetts, and contains more than 100 academic, athletic, and residential buildings.[2] There are 360 voting faculty members, with a student-to-faculty ratio of 6:1. As of 2022, the school has an enrollment of 2,021 undergraduate students and 50 graduate students.[5]
Following a liberal arts curriculum, Williams College provides undergraduate instruction in 25 academic departments and interdisciplinary programs including 36 majors in the humanities, arts, social sciences, and natural sciences. Williams offers an almost entirely undergraduate instruction, though there are two graduate programs in development economics and art history. The college maintains affiliations with the nearby Clark Art Institute and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), and has a close relationship with Exeter College, Oxford. The college competes in the NCAA Division III New England Small College Athletic Conference as the Ephs. Williams College has won 22 of the last 24 College Directors' Cups for NCAA Division III.[6]
Prominent alumni include 9 Pulitzer Prize winners, 2 Nobel Prize laureates, a Fields medalist, a Lasker award recipient, 16 billionaires, 71 members of the United States Congress, 22 U.S. Governors, 4 U.S. Cabinet secretaries, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, a President of the United States, 3 prime ministers, CEOs and founders of Fortune 500 companies, multiple Emmy, Oscar, Tony, and Grammy award winners, and professional athletes. Other notable alumni include 40 Rhodes Scholars[7][8] and 17 Marshall Scholarship recipients.[9][10]
Admissions statistics
8%
−10)52%
+7)720–770
740–790
+50 median)33–35
+1 median)90%
−1)100%
+2)1
4
7
23
Organization and administration[edit]
The Board of Trustees of Williams College has 25 members and is the governing authority of the college.[80] The President of the college serves on the Board ex officio. There are five Alumni Trustees, each of whom serves for a five-year term. There are five Term Trustees, each elected by the Board for five-year terms. The remaining 14 members are Regular Trustees, also elected by the Board but serving up 15 years, although not beyond their seventieth birthday. The current chair of the board of trustees is Liz Robinson.
The Board appoints as senior executive officer of the college a President who is also a member of and the presiding officer of the faculty. Nine senior administrators report to the President including the Dean of the Faculty, Provost, and Dean of the college. Adam F. Falk is the 17th president of Williams, and took office on April 1, 2010.
College Council (CC) is the student government of Williams College. Its members are elected to represent each class year, the first-year dorms, and the student body at large. CC allocates funds from the Student Activities Fee, appoints students to the faculty-student-administration committees that oversee most aspects of college life, and debates issues of concern to the entire campus community. College Council is the forum through which students address concerns and make changes around campus. CC is led by two co-presidents.
To manage its endowment, the college started the Williams College Investment Office in 2006. The Investment Office is located in Boston, Massachusetts. Collette Chilton is the Chief Investment Officer. In 2020, the endowment-per-student ratio reached $1.40 million unadjusted for inflation, while in 1990, it was $151,000. Adjusting for inflation, the endowment-per-student ratio had still increased to almost $600,000.[81] In 2021, Williams' endowment-per-student ratio was one of nine colleges or universities to exceed $2 million along with Princeton, Yale, MIT, Stanford, Harvard,
Amherst, Pomona, and Swarthmore.[82]
Student activities and traditions[edit]
Student media[edit]
The longest-running student newspaper at Williams is the Williams Record, a weekly broadsheet paper published on Wednesdays. The newspaper was founded in 1887, and now has a weekly circulation of 3,000 copies distributed in Williamstown, in addition to more than 600 subscribers across the country. The newspaper formerly received no financial support from the college or from the student government and relied on revenue generated by local and national ad sales, subscriptions, and voluntary contributions for use of its website, but the paper went into debt in 2004 and is now subsidized by the Student Activities Tax. Both Sawyer Library and the College Archives maintain more than a century's worth of publicly accessible, bound volumes of the Record. The newspaper provides access free of charge to a searchable database of articles stretching back to 1998 on its website.
The student yearbook is called The Gulielmensian, which means "Williamsian" in Latin. It was published irregularly in the 1990s, but has been annual for the past several years and dates back to the mid-19th century.[121]
Numerous smaller campus publications are also produced each year, including The Telos, a journal of Christian thought; The Haystack, a humor magazine; the Williams College Law Journal, a collection of undergraduate articles; the Literary Review, a literary magazine; and Monkeys With Typewriters, a magazine of non-fiction essays.