Home Blog Page 3

Men’s basketball: College falls on the road to Howard, 67-58

After notching its first victory of the season against Liberty a few days earlier, William and Mary entered its matchup against Howard Saturday seeking to keep the momentum alive in the form of another win.

The Tribe cut the Bison lead to just one point late in the second half, but the Bison recovered both times to pull away with the 67-58 victory. The loss, which drops the College to 1-6 overall, was the Tribe’s fourth straight road contest.

“We weren’t really pleased with our performance,” head coach Tony Shaver said. “We felt our execution could be at a different level than it really was and the two things that probably hurt us the most were some key turnovers and then their offensive rebounding.”

One of the prevalent themes of the young season has been the Tribe’s inability to win the rebounding battle.
The Bison bested the College on the boards 35-25, and almost half of Howard’s rebounds came off the offensive glass — a statistic which translated into 18 second-chance points.

The College showed defensive improvement from some of its other recent contests, but Howard was able to score a bevy of points down low. Howard scored a whopping 42 points in the paint compared to 24 for the College. The Bison shot 44 percent from the field and just 18 percent from beyond the arc.

“In the half court our five-on-five defense was good, very good, but we gave up 18 points in transition baskets off of steals and that was a big difference in the ball game,” Shaver said.

While the Tribe held its own defensively, the College struggled on offense. A traditionally strong three point shooting team, the Tribe went a disappointing four for 19 from downtown. The Tribe shot 39 percent from the field.

“It’s been a problem for the year,” Shaver said. “I felt back in the fall that this would probably the best shooting team I’ve coached at William and Mary, and we really haven’t shot well. I think there are reasons for that but I think we missed a lot of open shots in that game. To be good we need to make shots. We’ve known that for quite a while.”

Sophomore guard Brandon Britt led the way for the College with 15 points and three assists, while freshman forward Tom Schalk added 10 points in 22 minutes of playing time.

Schalk, along with freshman guard Marcus Thornton, who made his homecoming to the Washington D.C. area, have both made an impact in the early going. Thornton added eight points and an assist on the night.

“We’ve been forced to play them, quite honestly,” Shaver said. “I don’t want to talk about our injuries all day but it’s real simple — we’ve had five guys that missed the entire pre-season … Tom Schalk in particular has played very well. He’s earned continued playing time so he’s been very impressive in his play.”

One of the key reasons for the College’s offensive woes was the quiet performance of senior forward Quinn McDowell, the squad’s leading scorer. McDowell, who has been slowed by a knee injury, took just one shot from the floor in 33 minutes of action.

“There’s no question how people are defending him,” Shaver said. “They’re being very physical with him. The number one priority of people that play us is to take Quinn out of the offense, but honestly Quinn is not himself right now. Physically, he’s not full speed and he doesn’t quite have that explosiveness that I think he will in time. Like so many of our players, he missed almost the entire preseason and he’s just not himself right now.”

While the College awaits McDowell’s healthy return, the Tribe saw its tenuous injury situation improve slightly with the return of sophomore forward Tim Rusthoven Saturday. Rusthoven made an instant impact, adding 13 points and six rebounds in his first action this season.

“It is going to be a big boost for us,” Shaver said. “Tim has only practiced two hours, not two days, two hours, but Tim’s gonna be one of our best players and having him back out there is a big step in us moving in the right direction, no question about it … It’s obviously taken Quinn time to get back to where we know he can play and the same thing is going to be true with Tim. It’s a big step to get him back, but we can’t expect miracles from the guy right away.”

The Tribe returns home Wednesday for a clash with Atlantic-10 foe Richmond.

Commentary: Give thanks for Grimes

It’s somewhat fitting that on his last play from scrimmage for William and Mary, senior running back Jonathan Grimes helped the Tribe find the endzone for the go-ahead score without even touching the ball. There were just six seconds remaining in the game, the Tribe was down 23-19 with a fourth down and goal from the Richmond 2 yard line.

“We kind of thought that they would hand it to Grimes,” Richmond head coach Wayne Lineburg said. “As good a player as he is, we thought he would try to get two yards.”

Instead, the senior — who has spent his time with the Tribe doing whatever’s been asked of him; running, kick returning, receiving and blocking — remained in the backfield and stoned Richmond defensive end Jacob Pierce, who has about a 50 pound weight advantage, giving sophomore quarterback Brent Caprio just enough time to hit junior tight end Nolan Kearney for the touchdown and end the College’s 2011 campaign with a 25-23 victory.

Of course, it would all be less fitting if Grimes hadn’t set up the touchdown pass with a four-yard run — a feat as familiar as the black elbow pads on either side of his no. 34 jersey — or if he wasn’t the reason the College was even in the game to begin with; Grimes carried 39 times for 207 yards and a touchdown in the win.

And so it was that one of the most impressive careers ever played out in a Tribe uniform came to an end Nov. 19, but not without the senior putting some final touches on the William and Mary record books he’d been re-writing since 2008, when he set the school’s freshman rushing record with 929 yards on 164 carries.
Grimes’ 39 carries against Richmond set a new single-game school record, and his 207 yards gave him 1,431 for the season, breaking the previous single-season school record of 1,408 set by Robert Green in 1990. Back in 2008 he broke the school’s career all-purpose yards record, and earlier this season he became the College’s leading career rusher.

After the win at Richmond, head coach Jimmye Laycock, who has coached Grimes as well as other great Tribe running backs like Derek Fitzgerald and Alvin Porch, was asked to put Grimes’s career in perspective.

“We don’t have enough time. I would love to but it wouldn’t do it justice, trying to [encapsulate] it here right now,” Laycock said, tearing up. “He has had a fantastic career, and I mean there’s no way to describe it. We’ll miss him.”

For a coach who will never be known for excessive displays of emotion, it was a touching moment.
Always the team player, Grimes himself opted to talk about how big the win was for the team.

“It’s just an awesome feeling,” he said. “Since I’ve been here, we haven’t won the last game [of the season]. But now we’re going out on a win, and it’s been a tough season. This is something that the team next year can build off of and it was just a good win for the school and a good win for coach.”

Laycock has said that nobody tops Grimes’s work ethic. Coaches would have to take the back off the field during practice for fear of wearing him out because he had one gear: full speed. It’s what allowed him to rack up such incredible numbers over his four seasons at the College. He’s never had blinding speed or bruising strength — the media guide has him listed at 5’10”, 201 pounds — but he’s always picked up a hunk of his yardage after contact, never going down easily and never stepping out of bounds.

“Jon plays like that every snap. Every snap of every game, every snap of practice,” Laycock said.

It’s how you become the best player in the CAA — a conference in which the spotlight and attention is limited — and the greatest back in the history of William and Mary — a school where athletics are more often than not on the periphery. Grimes has never demanded the praise and glorification BCS players regularly get, though he clearly could’ve held his own in the more prestigious division. He has worked hard in every practice and every game — whether in the semifinal round of the NCAA playoffs or the waning minutes of the Tribe’s 21-0 loss to Delaware this year (a game in which Grimes had a part of his ear ripped off in the earlygoing, took one series off and then got back to action despite the lost cause).

Whenever he scored, the ball went right to the referee and the credit to his offensive line. He epitomized the term “class act”.

It’s why we can all just hope to see him playing next season on Sundays. Personally, I’d love for him to join former Tribe great Adrian Tracy with my hometown Giants.

But regardless of where he lands in 2012, during this holiday season, we should all be thankful for getting to watch him play. Like Laycock said, we’ll miss him.

Professor passes away

Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Sarah Hammond passed away over Thanksgiving break. College of William and Mary administrators only became aware of her death when Hammond did not show up for class Monday. The cause of death was unknown at press time.

Chair of the Religious Studies Department John Morreall sent an email Monday to Hammond’s Religion in American Life and Thought to 1840 class.

“I have the awful responsibility of telling you that Prof. Sarah Hammond died unexpectedly over the Thanksgiving break,” Morreall said in the email. “We learned this only after she did not come in to teach your class this morning.”

Hammond was a native of Oberlin, Ohio. She received her B.A. in religious studies from Yale University in 1999, graduating magna cum laude.

According to the Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis, Hammond’s academic interests included 19th and 20th century evangelicalism; the intersection of religion, business and gender; and religion in popular culture.

After working on HIV/AIDS prevention among high-risk young women, Hammond returned to Yale in 2003 to earn her M.A. and M. Phil in religious studies. Hammond received her Ph.D. in American ligious History from Yale in 2010. Her dissertation, entitled “God’s Business Men: Entrepreneurial Evangelicals in Depression and War,” was being revised under contract with the University of Chicago Press.

According to the College website, Hammond specialized in American history and religious history, the relationship between religion and business and the history of Christianity.

While her classes will be cancelled all this week, the final research paper is still due next Monday, to be submitted to another professor in the religious studies department.

For more on this developing story, see Flathatnews.com.

School of Education hosts forum on Libyan revolution

The day after the capture of the last of Col. Muammar el-Gaddafi’s sons, the Libyan ambassador to the United States and the executive director of the Libya Forum for Human and Political Development gave a presentation at the College of William and Mary’s School of Education.

The forum, “Libya’s Transition to Democracy,” was hosted by the College and Libya El Hurra Charity and was moderated by Vice Provost for International Affairs of the Wendy and Emery Reves Center for International Studies Steve Hanson.

“As Vice Provost for International Affairs, my goal is to get William and Mary students in touch with the events that are changing the world right now, and this event to me encapsulates exactly where we want to be as a university,” Hanson said.

His Excellency Ambassador Ali Aujali, the first panelist to speak, discussed the Libyan people’s desire for democracy.

“They all believe in democracy, which they [have not] practiced for a long time; human rights, which have been abused during Gaddafi’s term; freedom of press, they don’t enjoy it for a long time,” Aujali said. “And these people, I am really confident that they will guard this revolution to reach its end.”

Aly Abuzaakouk, executive director of the Libya Forum for Human and Political Development and vice president of the Minaret of Freedom Institute, attended grammar school with Gaddafi. After taking a moment of silence for those who lost their lives in pursuit of freedom, Abuzaakouk explained the human rights abuses of the Gaddafi regime and the Libyan people’s devotion to freedom.

“Libya, which has about 6.5 million [people], lost up to almost 50,000 people dead,” Abuzaakouk said about the revolution. “Somebody told me it’s like losing 4 million in America if we convert the maths. That is the price that the Libyan people paid for their freedom, but it is a worthy price because the people who did it have a debt upon our shoulders that we will never give our country and our freedom back again to any maniac, to anyone who can claim to be solving of the problems of the world while he couldn’t even solve the problems of his family.”

After the discussion, the speakers took photos and spoke individually with audience members.

“I think there’s a genuine desire in the country to form a civil society that isn’t a dictatorship anymore,” Charles McLeod ’14 said after hearing the presentation.

McLeod appreciated the benefit of hearing a first-hand account of Gaddafi’s regime.

“When you hear about these things on television and from reading about them, you know about it intellectually, but you don’t actually make the human connection that there’s actually people who honestly suffer,” he said.

Omar Khalifa, senior advisor for Libya El Hurra Charity, credited the success of the event to “a multitude of truly dedicated and fantastic staff and volunteers both at the university and through the charity itself.”

“Speaking from the point of a charity, it certainly is in our interest as partners in developing civil society and capacity building projects in Libya to engage with distinguished partners such as [the College], and to engage with them in dialogue and discussion to help promote these activities both in Libya and of course engaging in that discussion here in the States,” Khalifa said.

In addition to Aujali and Abuzaakouk, His Excellency Mr. Aburrahman Shalgham, the Libyan ambassador to the United Nations, was originally scheduled to speak at the event, but was ultimately unable to attend.

More traffic on the road less traveled

Bucky Dow’s ’12 voice mixes with sounds of the other College of William and Mary students filtering through Lodge One. Nothing sets him apart from the traditional college crowd snagging sandwiches or catching up with friends — he bears no scarlet “T” to mark him as a transfer student.

Ben Kirby ’12 mingles with the other students bustling about the Grind. He grabs his coffee, relaxes at a table and blends into the afternoon scene. He, too, bears no scarlet “T.”

But both Dow’s and Kirby’s paths to the College differ from those of “natives,” students who apply to the College right after high school. “I wasn’t on the college path at all, and I didn’t even plan on going to college for the tail end of my senior year of high school,” Dow said. “I barely graduated high school.”

Dow eventually enrolled at Richard Bland College, the College’s junior institution in Petersburg, with hopes of transferring to the College in the future.

Kirby enrolled at Virginia Military Institute. He eventually transferred to Northern Virginia Community College but had his sights set on enrolling at the College.

“I came here for prospective transfer day and really loved it,” Kirby said. “I was originally at community college to get those GER credits out of the way. Biology is biology anywhere. I paid maybe $100 per credit at [Northern Virginia Community College], so I was able to save a lot of money.”

Dow and Kirby joined 202 enrolling transfers in the fall of 2010. Community college transfers now comprise 45 percent of total enrollment of transfers as compared to 36 percent in past years, according to Associate Dean of Admission Kim Van Deusen.

With the economy in turmoil, the College has seen an increase in the numbers of students choosing the two-year college to four-year college path and non-traditional students.

Non-traditional students are defined as students who are 24 years of age or older. Referred to as “Prime Tribers,” the students constitute a larger number of students at the College than ever before.

“We had 15 Prime Tribers last fall and 48 this fall,” Assistant to the Dean of Students Ben Boone said. “I think part of that is our relationship with the community colleges, but a lot of it has to do with the economy. They might have had a career before the economy headed down. I know that one student had a 30-year-long career, but when she retired, she wanted to go back to college.”

Financial services company Sallie Mae recently released a nationwide survey for the 2010-11 academic year, showing that families paid about 9 percent less for education than during the 2009-10 academic year.

The study also showed an increase in the applications for financial aid and grants, correlating with the economic recession. The decrease in education payments was also a result of students shifting from higher-cost schools to lower-cost schools.

For high-income families, enrollment at two-year public colleges increased from 12 to 22 percent between 2009-11.

Middle-income families showed a decrease in enrollment at four-year public colleges, with 53 percent enrolled in 2009-10 to 44 percent enrolled in 2010-11, while low-income families remained fairly consistent with 33 percent enrolled in two-year colleges and 46 percent enrolled at four-year colleges.

The College has seen an increase in the number of transfer applications, which also correlates with increasing enrollment at community colleges. According to Van Deusen, the number of applications has increased from around 500 to 950 annually within the last decade.

The number of transfer applications from Virginia community colleges has more than doubled in the past five years.

“Sometimes community colleges aren’t last resorts,” University Registrar Sara Marchello said. “It might be for economic reasons or because the student is place-bound. They might be students with really excellent preparation, but, for whatever reason, choose community college first and then turn to four-year colleges.”

The College has taken multiple steps to accommodate the increase.

“There wasn’t really a large support network there to deal with transfer students at first,” Boone said. “But some years ago we put in an application for a Jack Kent Cooke grant. It was geared toward funding initiatives across campus. We didn’t receive the grant, but out of that meeting, though, came a group effort to look at the transfer population on campus.”

Marchello directs the co-enrollment program, a new program established to allow students at six community colleges in the area to experience the College without the pressures of academic commitment.

Students in the program take classes at the College and receive credit that can go to their College degree, even though the grades go on their community college transcript. They experience life on the campus and interact with both students and professors.

“It lets them put their toe in the water and see what they like here,” Marchello said. “If they decide to transfer, they come in at an advantage because they know the campus. There’s something about having a sense of [the] place that makes the transition smoother. We have a high success rate with those transfer students. They’ve done well here, been retained, graduated and succeeded.”

Virginia also mandates a guaranteed admission program for students at community colleges. If a student maintains a 3.6 GPA and graduates with an associate’s degree at the community college, he or she can enroll at any Virginia public university.

Students can also transfer in from other four-year colleges and can opt to return to college past the age of 24 as Prime Tribers.

“Transfer students bring an incredible amount of diversity, in the greatest sense of diversity,” Boone said. “These are students that have increasingly had greater commitments. That perspective and work ethic is really different from an 18-year-old freshman’s perspective.”

The different experience that the transfer students bring to campus sometimes causes problems in regard to adjusting to the College.

With various commitments outside of academics, transfer students enter the College with different needs. Transfer students are grouped separately from freshmen during Orientation and receive help with other needs such as housing, parking and registration.

As a result of the growing number of transfer students and their various needs, the College hopes to look at changing the structure of Orientation for transfer students.

“We’re looking at making some necessary programmatic changes, especially with Orientation,” Boone said. “I’m working closely with the Director of Orientation to look at how we can accommodate the 30-year-old single mother with two kids. It’s not feasible for her to be here for five days from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. They’ve been going through the same process as other students. We’re pretty flexible, but there are certain requirements that they have to have because of federal regulation or College policy.”

But assimilation beyond Orientation still proves to be the largest struggle. Dow served as a transfer Orientation Aide this past August and hoped to impart some of his experience with the transfer process.

“I feel that of our own doing, [transfer students] tend to wall ourselves out. I just wanted to make sure that they were reaching out,” Dow said. “When I came to William and Mary, I had the fear that I didn’t want to impose myself on groups. But you need to get out there, and no one’s really going to judge you.”

As the number of transfers applying to the College increases, both administrators and fellow transfer students hope to guide a growing population at the College.

“We’re still trying to answer the question of how we serve our different kinds of transfer populations most effectively,” Boone said.

Professor’s research questions validity of records

There’s a certain prestige that comes with being the second oldest college in the country, but the College of William and Mary’s age also ties it to some unsavory things. English professor Terry Meyers spoke about his research Nov. 21 concerning a blemish on the College’s long history: slavery.

Meyers first became interested in the subject with his discovery of the Bray School, which may have been the first to educate free and enslaved blacks in the British colonies. The building in question currently houses the Reserved Officers’ Training Corps program.

“[The Bray School] made very concrete to me slavery and the College,” Meyers said.

Pro-slavery and discriminatory sentiments color a large portion of the College’s history. During the Civil War, students wanted to fly a secessionist flag over the Sir Christopher Wren Building, but the College’s president at the time did not allow it. In 1926, the Ku Klux Klan gave the College an American flag as a gift. The College’s president accepted the gift but criticized the Klan in his acceptance speech.

Meyers believes that written histories of the College have tried to sugarcoat parts of the College’s past that allude to its acceptance of slavery. The Nottoway Quarter, for instance, was a tobacco plantation owned by the College and maintained by slave labor.

“It’s not mentioned in any history of the College at all,” Meyers said. “[Profits from it were] used to pay scholarships for the less wealthy white [students].”

The fact that the College owned slaves was incorporated into The Owl, a humorous publication from 1854. A political cartoon depicted slaves in Williamsburg being treated well and laborers enduring terrible working conditions at Yale University.

“[The message was that it was] better to be a slave in Williamsburg than to be a worker in New Haven,” Meyers said.

Meyers explained how controversial the abolitionist movement was at the College. In 1791, the College granted Granville Sharp, a fervent abolitionist, an honorary degree.

“It would be like William and Mary giving an honorary degree to … I can’t think of somebody controversial enough,” Meyers said.

Thomas Jefferson, an alumnus of the College, was also wary of the controversy.

“[Abolition was] such a delicate subject,” Meyers said. When Jefferson wrote on it, he “talked about it in such indirect ways…that the editors didn’t know what he was talking about,” Meyers said.

None of Meyers’ findings are technically new. Most of his work has consisted of finding ambiguous sources that were already published and fitting all of the pieces together.

“It’s almost all published,” Meyers said. “[It’s] been known but just kept isolated.”

The talk attracted a respectable turnout of Meyers’ colleagues in the English Department, who praised the extent of his investigation.

“Professor Meyers has certainly done a ton of research,” English professor Hermine Pinson said. “[It is] definitely a good start.”

English professor Adam Potkay echoed this affirmation of the research.

“[It was] a very good, balanced historical survey of the evidence,” he said.

Meyers’ research overlaps with the Lemon Project, an initiative started in 2009 with the goal of rectifying damages done to African Americans throughout the College’s history. Meyers, however, does not believe that has yet been done.

“We have yet, I think, to go beyond acknowledging our complacence of slavery,” he said.

Model UN brings high schoolers to campus

The College of William and Mary hosted approximately 1,000 high school students for the 25th annual William and Mary High School Model United Nations Conference from Nov. 18 to 20.

The College’s Model UN team, which is part of the International Relations club, administered the conference, known as WMHSMUN. The IR club event attracted high schools from places all around the country.

“We have actually 1,000 high schoolers that come from all over the country, about 60 schools or so, mostly in Virginia, Maryland, some from North Carolina,” Secretary General Will Shimer ’13 said. “This year, we’re excited to welcome some schools from California, Florida and even Costa Rica.”

Expanding the Model UN program and attracting schools from diverse locations was an important goal this year for Registration Director Brendan Greenley ’13.

“I wanted to get schools that could increase the level of debate,” Greenley said.

For the Model UN team, WMHSMUN is an essential fundraiser. Proceeds from the event fund the club’s trips to nationwide conferences throughout the year.

“After a while, you couldn’t ask club members to pay for a bus to Georgetown or up to Pennsylvania, so we needed a club fundraiser, and a lot of colleges around the country started running high school Model UN conferences,” Shimer said. “We charge the high schoolers to come here, and we use that money to travel to other college conferences.”

In addition to raising funds, the conference is meant to encourage conversation and debate among high school students about world issues. The committees the students served on and the topics they discussed reflected current events, and thus were subject to some unpredictability.

“We had the Apple Board of Directors, and then Steve Jobs dies, and so it’s like, ‘Oh. How do we deal with that?’” Shimer said. “Or, we have Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and of course everything with Syria and Libya — it’s constantly changing.”

WMHSMUN also serves as a means of attracting prospective students to the College.

“It’s a great way to promote William and Mary,” Leena Al-Souki ’14 said. “Lots of the high school students who come here to the conference decide that they really like it. They see how we work, how organized we are, and they see William and Mary and how awesome it is, and a lot of them come here because of the conferences that we do.”

Between the opening ceremonies on Friday and the closing ceremonies on Sunday, students attended committee sessions, a ghost tour, a delegate social and a keynote presentation by a member of the U.S. Department of State.

“I think it went really well,” Greenley said. “Of all the emails I’ve gotten, I haven’t gotten a single complaint. Everything from the keynote speaker to the closing ceremonies went flawlessly.”

The Model UN team’s next project is the William and Mary Middle School Model UN Conference, which will take place in February. Meanwhile, planning will begin almost immediately for next year’s high school conference.

The Woodlands Hotel and Suites served as the primary lodging facility for the high school students who participated in the conference.

Behind Closed Doors: Snap judgments eliminate romantic possibilities

My friends and I used to play this game in middle school: do, date, dismiss. You were given three names, sometimes school cuties, sometimes the boy with cooties, and you had to choose one to do — or whatever the middle school equivalent was — one to date and one to, heartbreakingly — if they were all wonderful — dismiss, to be re-evaluated in a later round. We would play this game late into the night, thinking about all the possibilities to do, date, and dismiss.

Recently, I’ve heard of a new collegiate twist on this middle school game, called blackout. When someone walks by, you call out a number — the number of drinks it would take for you to hook up with him or her. You say blackout if you’d have to be completely hammered and wouldn’t want to remember the experience. It seems like a pretty funny idea. What you fail to take into account, however, is that you are making a snap judgment about someone, possibly based on nothing more than seeing him or her in that one moment, and you’re saying it out loud. You’re sharing that judgment with at least one other person, who, at the very least, can hold you accountable for that judgment.

A couple weeks ago, there was a pretty big to-do made about a student at the College of William and Mary who posted a picture of a “hit list” that he and some of his friends wrote up of all the girls they had hooked up with. It had tally marks next to each name for the number of people within the group that had hooked up with her. The tally marks were anonymous, but the girls’ names were posted on Twitter for everyone to see.
I walk down Richmond Road to my apartment at least twice a day. At least once some guy driving down the road hollers at me. It doesn’t matter whether I’m wearing booty shorts or sweatpants, if I’m alone or with others, or if I’m carrying my sizeable backpack on my shoulders. They honk, they roll their windows down and whistle, or they yell out suggestions for an evening in my presence: “Wanna grab a pizza and bang?”
I don’t believe any of this — the blackout game, the group hit list or the hollering out car windows — seems like they’re done for any reason other than entertainment. It appears to be “just for a laugh.” But there’s damage being done here — not just to the person who got a “blackout” called, or whose name ended up on the list, or who got shouted at on the street. In “blackout,” sharing your judgment with another person seems harmless. But what if you end up meeting them out at the bars with your sober judgment still intact and you find out that he or she actually has the most beautiful smile or has an unforgettable laugh or is an amazing dancer? You can’t take back judgment and saying it aloud makes it more permanent than you may have intended — it could even stand to keep you from making a move on that individual who may be just as good at moving in bed.

And the Internet never forgets. A picture posted of a girl’s name with five tallies — be it true or not — could be enough to discourage a guy who saw it from asking that cute girl in his chem class on a date. What if someone’s chance at true love was stopped before it even started because someone posted something “just for a laugh?” And let me let you in on a secret: No one finds it flattering to be shouted from a car window. It doesn’t make you cool, and if I happen to see you in class, I won’t ever take you seriously. Because whatever words you thought were so amazing that I had to hear them on my walk to school this morning made me wonder if there was something wrong with my clothes or my hair or my walk that made me seem like someone who wanted to be hollered at. You just isolated a potential formal date, drinking buddy or lab partner without even knowing my name.

It’s important to remember that in these scenarios, the objects of our entertainment are people. Real people with real feelings who could get hurt, even if it was never your intention. Imagine if you heard someone shout “blackout!” when you walked by or had your sexual history posted on the Internet for everyone to see. It’s important to remember that you’re never too old to treat people the way you want to be treated, and you never know how it could pay off for you later. So do think about consequences, leave opportunities to find dates wide open, and dismiss the idea that it’s all “just for a laugh.”

__Krystyna Holalnd is a Behind Closed Doors columnist and will continue to ignore all catcalls coming her way during her commute.__

Making Impressions

The College of William and Mary has a long history of providing students with unique experiences and high quality instruction, but Art History 330, taught by distinguished Scholar in Residence Dr. John T. Spike, brings that tradition of excellence to a new level. The students in his seminar collaborated with the staff of the Muscarelle Museum of Art to produce the newest exhibition at the museum, “Seeing Colors: Secrets of the Impressionists.”

The pieces, on loan from the High Museum in Atlanta, Ga., include works by Claude Monet, including “Houses of Parliament in the Fog,” Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and several American Impressionists including John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase and John Henry Twachtman.

“In very few other places do undergraduates get to work with Monets or get to work with Pissarros,” Jason Gangwer ’12 said.

The show seeks to highlight five “secrets,” or aspects in the artists’s work not seen in previous pieces. These include painting outside, careful color selection, painting everyday scenes, a recognizable style for each artist and how the artist tries to convey a subjective feeling, rather than simple beauty.

“This glorious exhibition is probably the most important exhibition that the Muscarelle has ever hosted,” Spike said in an interview with WMTV.

The attention garnered by the show thus far seems to support Spike’s claim. Dr. Aaron De Groft, Director of the Muscarelle Museum, noted recent stories in The Virginian Pilot, The Daily Press and World News.

“When it goes out on that sort of wire, it really sort of explodes,” he said.

The show was heavily advertised. There have been ads in many local newspapers, the alumni magazine, and in movie theaters from Tyson’s Corner to Virginia Beach, a total of 400 million media impressions.

“This is new,” De Groft said. “I’ve done this in other places, and we’re going to see how incredibly successful this will be.”

One of the most important elements when planning the show was the layout. The students had to keep in mind lighting, color, painting size and how those aspects would affect the viewer. The students had the gallery completely laid out but then the paintings arrived, and they realized that they were going to have to revamp their original design.

“We changed it, eighty percent of it,” De Groft said. “I think we changed almost everything, except the Monet being in the middle of the one wall.”

The first gallery of the exhibition is a didactic space. Catherine Barth ’12 pointed to several features of the room which were particularly important.

“[There are] long panels where you see … color contrasts, scenes of daily life, and then we show examples of paintings or prints on the walls so that you can actually see what it is that we’re talking about.”

Barth also worked on a music station in the same room that plays music from the time period.

The second gallery, where the Pissarros, Monets and Renoirs hang, is the main focus of the exhibition. The highlight is Monet’s “Houses of Parliament in the Fog,” one of the several studies that the artist painted during his time in London.

Finally, the third room features paintings by famous American Impressionist artists.

“[We wanted to] highlight these five secrets that really set the Impressionists apart from previous forms of art,” Kennis Forte ’13 said. “Impressionism is this huge thing; everyone loves Impressionist work, and it’s important to know why.”

Students were broken up into groups to work on different aspects of the show, including writing and researching the labels accompanying each of the works and designing the educational programming.
“[I] developed lesson plans, specifically for fifth to eighth graders, that kind of dive deeper into these five secrets and then try to apply them to different areas of their curricula,” Chelsea Bracci ’13 said. “We had an entire lesson about optics and colors and color theory, and how does that then tie in with marketing and images we see today, to really try to show them that impressionism didn’t stop with the Impressionists per se, but then actually went [further into] their fast food signs… just [to] try to make them aware of things like that.”

The education was not just geared toward schoolchildren. Students in the class used their research to develop guided tours of the exhibit.

“What we were learning in the class was just Impressionism in general, and then we were taking that knowledge, doing further research, and developing our own statements about [the pieces],” Bernotas said. “We developed a six-page tour script.”

This show provided learning experiences for students beyond educating visitors about the significance of the works of art and the layout of the gallery. Members of the marketing team also gained valuable hands-on experience.

“We’re getting out into the world, we’re doing all this press stuff, we had a class blog,” Monika Bernotas ’12 said. “We’re trying to connect the community with [the Muscarelle] and just help them learn more about Impressionism.”

Not only did the class provide information for the actual museum, but they also helped to create an online experience.

“If [people] searched for certain pictures then they would be taken to the Muscarelle website and then learn about the exhibition that way,” Alex Purcell ’12 said.

The extensive students’s research applies to the website as well.

“[I’m] working on a new project about seeing what actually drew people to the exhibition,” Purcell said. “Was it the website? Was it advertisements, signs or word of mouth?”

The exhibition will stay at the Muscarelle until Jan. 22, giving students the opportunity to continue sharing all the work they have done in the class.

“This show has been such an important part of our semester,” Kristen Scully ’14 said. “It’s a huge experience for us as students. Part of the fun of the show is being able to share it with all our friends… After class, [if] I see a friend, I tell them exactly what happened that day. It’s been such a unique, exciting and wonderful experience.”

Pirates at the College

It is 1685, and all is quiet on the open sea. Three men stand on the deck of their ship, eyes on the ocean. The sails of the Batchelor’s Delight flap lightly against the wind, matching the sound of water slapping against the side of the vessel. Before them, the vast ocean reflects the sky. There is only one blemish on their horizon: A fleet of ships, flying the Spanish flag.

These men are Captain Edward Davis, Dr. Lionel Wafer and John Hingson, and they are pirates. Without them — without their treasure — the College of William and Mary as we know it would not exist.

“There’s no other college in the world that has this kind of historical founding in their background,” John Millar M.A. ’81 said. “The only one that comes close is Brown University, which was founded on the rum smuggling trade, which is almost as good.”

Millar is a local resident who has spent a great deal of time looking into the story of the Batchelor’s Delight, researching the crew’s travels and speaking with other historians who are familiar with these particular pirates.

“I had heard a rumor about it years ago and since I had been a graduate student at William and Mary, I followed up the rumor by going into the rare books section in Swem library,” Millar said. “There are two 17th century books there that tell this story, written by two of the pirates.”

These journals belong to Wafer and William Dampier, another member of the crew who left the group before Davis, Wafer and Hingson were arrested, had their loot confiscated, and watched as it was used to found a college. Before the pirates were captured, however, they sailed up and down the coast of South America, looting Spanish merchant ships and raiding coastal towns.

“It’s something that we don’t think about too often,” Linda Rowe, Colonial Williamsburg historian, said. “The whole idea of piracy affecting Virginia waters and the capes and the whole Eastern seaboard.”

The Delight was a mighty ship in its time. She was constructed in Denmark and boasted 36 guns and 70 men. The act of obtaining a ship was difficult for most pirates, unless they were particularly successful in their pillaging and plundering. Vessels were sometimes taken by might, sometimes stolen, and sometimes won. In the case of the Batchelor’s Delight, two members of the crew, Dampier and William Ambrosia Cowley, won her from a Danish crew in a card game when they had stopped in the Sierra Leone River.

Originally captained by John Cook, the Batchelor’s Delight sailed from Africa, around Cape Horn, and began attacking Spanish merchant ships and plundering coastal towns on the other side of the continent, making its way up the American coast, all the way from Chile to California. Spanish merchants would take the silver and gold they had from Bolivia and take it to the coast by going over the mountains in Chile.

“Since the mountains are straight up and down all the way along that coast, there was no room to build a road on the coast,” Millar said. “The best way to move things along the coast was by ship. Pirates had an open field day because they had 14 cannons and a strong will. And the Spanish were practically defenseless, because they didn’t think they would have had enemies along that coast, so why invest in cannons.”

The crew’s pillaging and plundering continued until the Spanish began to return the insult, sending out ships to find and arrest pirates. In 1684, Cook died and Davis took his place, captaining his crew as it fled from Chile, losing their pursuers around New Zealand, then rounding Cape Horn again and returning to their plundering on the other side of South America.

On this particular day, May 29, 1685, Davis, Wafer and Hingson were preparing for battle with the Spanish fleet, which they had been awaiting for months. They were told that the ships contained a great amount of treasure from Peru. Indeed, the fleet had contained Peruvian treasure, but since word of the pirates had reached them, they had left their goods safely on land and turned around to launch an attack.

The buccaneers were chased around the Panama Bay before finally shaking their attackers. But the battle caused riffs in their crew, and with other ships that accompanied the Batchelor’s Delight. By 1687, Davis, Wafer and Hingson were sitting in the Jamestown jail.

“We use this word ‘pirate’ that has been glamorized by Hollywood,” Millar said. “They really were a form of international terrorists.”

After their arrest, the pirates clung to the blurred line that existed between pirating and privateering. At that time, if they successfully proved that they were acting on behalf of the King and were looting for the good of England, they could be pardoned.

“During peacetime, or when nations weren’t at war, piracy was one thing,” Rowe said. “But privateering for the benefit of the crown was legal at the time.”

Usually the difference between privateers and pirates was based on whether or not a war was occurring at the time. But since England and Spain fought so often to begin with, even that difference was often vague.

“Pirates brought back a lot of stuff they pillaged from the Spanish, who were their perpetual enemies,” Millar said. “Even if they may not have been fighting that year, people would turn a blind eye to it.”

The pirates in the Jamestown jail tried to hide behind this difference. But the stories they attempted to tell did not hold up. So their time in jail continued, and eventually they were sent to England to be dealt with.

The men were not chained or kept captive while they sailed for home, even though they were notorious for taking over ships from the inside. Their options were limited while they sailed to England, though, as authorities had put their treasure on a separate ship. Had they rebelled, they would have lost what they had spent so much time fighting for: their booty.

“It was a mixture of raw silver, gold and jewels,” Millar said. “Coins and things made out of silver, gold and jewels — jewelry, for example. Very expensive jewelry that would have been worn by the richest Spaniards.”

It took five years for Davis, Wafer and Hingson’s situation to be sorted out. Their fate was decided by King William and Queen Mary, since the pirates had appealed to them. Because they were arrested in Virginia, the monarchs decided to compromise: give the buccaneers back most of their loot, but use some to found a college requested by the colony.

300 pounds worth of treasure was given to James Blair to found a college, which was named ‘King William’s and Queen Mary’s,’ after its promoters.

Davis, Wafer and Higson weren’t the only pirates who were caught in Virginia. Blackbeard’s crew was arrested in Virginia, held in the Williamsburg jail and hanged there.

“I think the reason you don’t hear a lot about it in the historic area is because the threat dies off,” Rowe said. “It doesn’t continue at the same level through the Revolution. And since Colonial Williamsburg is concentrating on the war years, the whole piracy thing is not really a big feature of the interpretation. The earlier period doesn’t receive as much attention.”

Millar’s research has convinced him that the College should embrace its pirate history. He has suggested renaming the Health Center Lionel Wafer Hall, or calling a social club on campus “The Batchelor’s Delight.”

“If the world knew this about William and Mary, there would be twice as many applications for admission,” Millar said. “Twice as many people would be looking at the College.”

Recent articles

PEERAWUT RUANGSAWASDI AND CATHERINE STORKE / THE FLAT HAT

Chang, Sloane vie for student body president, participate in debate

Thursday, March 28, students of the College of William and Mary will vote for the next Student Assembly class representatives and SA president and vice president. This year, there are two candidates for the presidential position: Class of 2025 President Yannie Chang ’25 and Secretary of Health and Safety Terra M. Sloane ’25.

The Flat Hat endorses Chang-Aqeel for SA presidency

Thursday, March 28, students at the College of William and Mary will vote for the Student Assembly’s next president and vice president. This upcoming...
Terra Sloane and Oscar Lazo. COURTESY IMAGE / MOINCA BAGNOLI

Terra Sloane elected next student body president, divestment referendum passes

Thursday, March 28, SA Secretary of Health and Safety Terra Sloane ’25 and SA Secretary of Diversity Initiatives Oscar Lazo ’25 emerged victorious in this year’s competitive race to lead the College of William and Mary’s Student Assembly. The ticket faced competition from SA Class of 2025 President Yannie Chang ’25 and SA Sen. Hashir Aqeel ’25