Uncertain economic times are eliciting responses in the form of varied perspectives and views that often clash. Whatever their opinions, members of the Tribe are raising their voices.

While students headed home for fall break, two members of the College Republicans, James Joseph ’14 and Lisa Iverson ’12, attended and participated on Glenn Beck’s radio show at his studio in New York.

“Glenn Beck is out front in the conservative movement, and we are not going to agree on everything, but we would do it again,” Iverson said. “We were very pleased for the invitation.”

Prior to break, the College Republicans received an email from the Glenn Beck radio show inviting anyone who was interested to be part of the audience.

“I know Glenn Beck has had College Republicans on his show before, but I’m not 100 percent sure why the College Republicans were invited on the show,” Iverson said.

Beck argued that while the Tea Party movement has been accused of being violent, the Occupy Wall Street movement was more likely to cause violence down the line.

“[Occupy Wall Street protestors] are marching on wealthy people’s homes today. Is that not an intimidation tactic, at least?” Beck’s co-host Pat Gray said on the show. “When did the Tea Party ever march through anyone’s home?”

The discussion focused on instances when chaotic events spark revolutions, referring directly to some of the tactics of the Occupy Wall Street protestors.

Beck talked about the nature of revolutions, and opened the topic to audience members. Joseph, treasurer of the College Republicans, gave his input.

“A strong political leader comes to power and centralizes control,” Joseph responded.

Joseph also brought up examples of strong political leaders coming out of chaotic times in Germany and Russia.

Some things haven’t changed since 1693. At the College of William and Mary, the distinction between earning grades and receiving them has always been clear, and while grade inflation is a concern in much of the academic world, most students and faculty don’t see it as much of an issue at the College.

“At some points I’ve personally felt grade inflation, but I feel less of it here at William and Mary,” Asha Williams ’12 said.

Grade inflation, according to history professor Cindy Hahamovitch, is the practice of “giving students high grades, not because they merit them, but to avoid conflict or disappointment.” According to a recent study by former Duke University professor Stuart Rojstaczer and Furman University professor Christopher Healy, the phenomenon has been on the rise since the 1960s.

In 1960, approximately 15 percent of grades awarded at universities were A’s; in 2008, A’s accounted for 43 percent of grades given. For the 1991-1992 academic year, the average GPA at all universities was 2.93; for 2006-2007, the average was 3.11.

The phenomenon seems to be more prevalent at private schools, where almost half of the grades awarded in 2007 were A’s. The percentage of A’s was around 40 percent at public schools in the same year.

At the College, grade distribution percentages have remained consistent for the past five years, but cumulative GPA records indicate that students have slightly higher grades now than they did a few years ago.

The average undergraduate cumulative GPA in fall 2005 was 3.20, whereas the average in fall 2009 was 3.25.

In comparison, the average cumulative GPA in spring 2008 at the University of Virginia was 3.22, while the average cumulative GPA in fall 2008 at the College was 3.25.

Despite these creeping numbers, students and professors do not seem to have felt the effects of grade inflation at the College. One reason for this may be the culture of hard work on campus.

“We have a student body full of high achievers who are determined to have a good GPA, and they work for it,” Taylor Gaukel ’14 said.

Professor Marylou Zapf, who has taught at the College for a decade, believes the quality of students has always been high and is even on the rise. Fewer students ask about extra credit, and more students are interested in gaining knowledge, she said.

Student satisfaction with grading at the College may stem in part from the fact that most professors do not limit the number of students who can earn a high grade.

“If they all do well, they all do well, and vice-versa,” history professor Jody Allen said. “I give them a clear direction to what I’m looking for, and I’m looking for how well they complete the assignment.”
Professors’ approachability and accessibility may also be contributing factors.

“If they mark something down as wrong, and I talk to them about why I think it isn’t wrong, they’re willing to understand my reasoning,” Brittany Strimple ’13 said.

Encouraging students to treat their classes as learning opportunities rather than just GPA-boosters may decrease the pressure they feel to get straight A’s and the pressure professors feel to award them.

“Everything is geared toward passing exams, and it shouldn’t be that way,” chemistry professor Carey Bagdassarian said. “Students here learn how to think and play intellectually.”

Rather than identifying the school as suffering from grade inflation, students expressed satisfaction with the level of difficulty of their classes.

“I like this system because it makes it a bit more challenging to get the grade we really want while giving us a little net by making it harder to get a grade we don’t want,” Humzah Nasir ’14 said.

Graduate school is competitive, the job market is scarce and salaries are less than ideal, but according to a ranking by PayScale.com, all those long nights are paying off. The College of William and Mary is now ranked ninth in Payscale’s Top State Universities By Salary list.

The College beat out other institutions from around the state; Virginia Tech ranked at 17, the University of Virginia at 25 and George Mason University at 30. According to the rankings, which are based on data collected from alumni who complete a PayScale survey, the starting median salary for College alumni is $45,000, and mid-career salary is $96,500. For Virginia Tech, the numbers are $51,600 and $92,500, for U.Va., $49,500 and $90,300, and GMU, $48,800 and $88,600.

Additionally, the study found that graduates from the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) earned the highest salaries compared to all other subdivisions of the NCAA Football Bowl and ranked first for both average starting salaries and mid-career salaries. A number of factors may contribute to this success, such as the efforts of the Sherman and Gloria H. Cohen Career Center.

“The Cohen Career Center provides services and resources to build competence, confidence and the ability to manage lifelong career development,” Assistant Director Holly Meyer said.

The Alumni Association also provides a number of services to help graduates in the job market.

“William and Mary alumni are a proud and active community,” Brooke Harrison, alumni programs director, said. “The Alumni Association helps bridge the gap between academic and professional development and real-world mentorship with tools and networks to succeed, not the least of which are alumni chapters and city guides.”

Alumni Association Board of Directors President Peter Nance attributed the graduates’ success to the quality of education they received at the College and the school’s reputation.

“Having worked for a company that employed a number of William and Mary graduates, I think that William and Mary has really earned the reputation of graduating students who communicate and think logically about outcomes,” Nance said. “And I think that’s a direct outcome of our liberal arts education. The ranking is also a reflection of those who have come before, those who have graduated, by their performance [they’ve] really created a legacy that gives new graduates a head start, so I think that’s something really to celebrate.”
Nance also considered the bigger picture.

“Salary Potential Ranking is perhaps one measure of success,” he said. “I think that what we’ve really learned at the College is that grades aren’t the only thing; it’s really the totality of that you’ve done at the school.”
According to Harrison, the combined efforts of these groups successfully serve alumni.

“Connecting the breadth and wealth of alumni experience both to each other and to students is an essential partnership between academic programs, students, alumni, the Career Center and the Alumni Association,” she said.

The College of William and Mary made its mark at the annual Conference for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education Oct. 9–12.

Chosen to represent the College at this national event, Max Cunningham ’13, Sarah Hanke MMP ’10 and Lauren Edmonds ’11 attempted to show how far the College has come in its efforts to become an innovative and successful green school.

The Committee on Sustainability, formed in the fall of 2008, is responsible for navigating the College into a sustainable and eco-friendly place.

“The conference went very well,” Cunningham said in an email. “My presentation on a school-specific carbon offset program was well-received and led to a lively discussion of what it means to offset and how the current model of offsetting might be changing.”

The on-campus Carbon Offset program, started by Cunningham and former professor John Swaddle, was nominated for an AASHE award.

“The idea is that the opportunity exists to improve the energy efficiency of infrastructure on campus but that the funding to do so might not be immediately available (with all of the talk regarding financial difficulty, this should not be hard to imagine),” Cunningham said. “In my mind, offsetting on the college level does two basic things. First, it has a direct effect on the funding available to improve energy efficiency. This should be fairly obvious. I think the second benefit is that it raises awareness of sustainability issues and how sustainability might work moving into the 21st century.”

This program seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions wherever possible on campus and has proved to significantly reduce emissions, putting the College on the sustainability map as one of the first institutions of higher learning to focus on such an issue.

“Offsetting doesn’t necessarily change anything in dramatic fashion,” Cunningham said. “It works by individuals contributing to improving the efficiency of a system already in place. If individuals can actually participate in that process in a meaningful way, perhaps those individuals will start to see more clearly how they fit into the broader picture of sustainability.”

Hanke serves as a Sustainability Fellow for the College. She discussed the William and Mary Dining Services Sustainability Intern Program and the rapid progress the College has made with the program.

“[The Dining Services Sustainability Intern Program] helped Dining Services get a lot of sustainability related projects done in just three years,” Hanke said in an email. “I talked about our composting program, going trayless, the herb garden, the reusable to-go containers, and the cryovac machine and what role the interns played in each of those initiatives.”

Hanke stressed the importance of sustainable features of College Dining Services because of its indispensability to campus life.

“Dining Services becoming more sustainable is really important to the campus as a whole,” Hanke said. “Many students have a meal plan, so sustainability initiatives in Dining Services reach a wide audience. Dining Services also has the potential to impact our local economy by purchasing more food from local farmers, a goal we are working towards.”

The cost-effectiveness and leadership opportunities of the dining intern program were two features Hanke praised.

“Sometimes being sustainable costs more than business as usual, so being innovative can help to accomplish goals without spending a ton of money,” Hanke said. “Students are also great at being innovative and creative, and I think that’s part of what makes our intern program work so well. Besides the energy savings, I think the biggest benefit is the chance to educate students and give them leadership opportunities in sustainability related fields.”

Edmonds also presented her thesis at the conference, entitled “An Evaluation of Effective Structures for Campus Sustainability Programs at Institutions of Higher Education,” which she wrote while she was a College student.

“The conference was a great learning experience,” Hanke said in an email. “W&M was well-represented and we also learned a lot from other schools.”

When a student body collectively volunteers a total of 333,453 hours in one academic year, people start to notice. This commitment to service was recently recognized by the Greater Williamsburg Chamber and Tourism Alliance, which honored the College of William and Mary student body as the “corporate citizen of the year.”

“I think that a lot of the time students who do a lot of service on campus don’t get thanked enough,” Student Assembly President Kaveh Sadeghian ’12, who accepted the award on behalf of the student body, said. “You guys are the ones doing the service out there, and, in the spirit of William and Mary, it’s often rooted in humility.”

To celebrate the award, the SA held a reception and award ceremony for the leaders of the various service organizations honored by it.

“Every now and then, something happens that is so perfect, simply perfect, that it’s inspiring,” College President Taylor Reveley said. “And I think this is one of those occasions.”

Kevin Walsh, vice chairman of the alliance board, presented the award and praised student efforts in partnering with more than 120 local organizations and schools and in branching out both nationally and internationally. He noted that the College was ranked as the top university in the country for community service and volunteerism by Washington Monthly magazine.

The event’s keynote speaker was George Srour ’05, founder and editor-in-chief of the College’s DoG Street Journal and founder and “chief dreamer” of Building Tomorrow. The organization, which he started in an unused room in his parents’s house after graduation, has sent more than 1,500 kids to school in Uganda and was named a top up-and-coming social change organization by Echoing Green magazine. Srour was the first person to receive the James Monroe Prize for Civic Leadership from the College, and was named one of the top 100 most powerful people in Indiana by Indianapolis Monthly magazine.

Srour described himself as a typical College student who has a difficult time saying no when presented with an opportunity and as the type of person to argue with any alumnus that he had a better time while at the College. Srour said the three most important things he learned while at the College were humility, community and the ability to dream.

“When I got here, I realized that all the people who made up my freshman hall and who made up my classes and who made up all the organizations I was involved with were all awesome,” Srour said. “And I learned that humility was key. I can’t tell you how many things that I applied to when I was on this campus that I got denied to do.”

Srour said he has kept the rejection letters as a source of inspiration, but in looking back at his time at the College, he focuses on what he was able to do. He claimed, that it was the supportive community that allowed him to dream big and to start the DoG Street Journal.

“This was an incredible place to start it,” Srour said.

In offering some words of wisdom, Srour not only told students to make the most of their time at the College, but also also to not take themselves too seriously.

“This is a really awesome place, but don’t take yourself too seriously,” he said. “A lot of what I learned and a lot of what I continue to use today are the experiences that happened outside of the classroom.”

Reveley praised both Srour and the student leaders for continuing the College’s long tradition of community service.

“This is a perfect award for our students,” Reveley said. “And it’s a nifty looking award.”

A woman carrying a fake grenade in her pocket entered the Williamsburg City Police station Friday morning and deposited it on the desk, causing the building to be evacuated and the U.S. Department of Defense to be called to the scene.

The woman, who has a military background, picked up what she thought was a deformed, unexploded, military-issue grenade off of a street close to the intersection of Matoaka Court and Richmond Rd.

“At 9:50 a.m. this morning, a civilian arrived at the Williamsburg Police Station with an item she believed might be an unexploded ordnance device,” Williamsburg Communication Specialist Kate Hoving said in a press release.

A Yorktown Naval Weapons Station team was dispatched to the police station once the Department of Defense was notified by the Williamsburg Fire Department of the incident.

The device was determined to be a cigarette lighter shaped to look like a grenade.

“If I had picked it up and held it like the individual, I might have ascertained that it was a novelty device, but I didn’t actually handle the device,” Williamsburg Fire Chief William Dent said in response to criticisms that the cigarette lighter was not initially detected. “No one from the police station or the fire department handled the device. The woman walked into the police station with it in her pocket and set it down on the desk.”

The Yorktown Special Weapons Team was called instead of the Police Bomb Squad because the grenade was suspected to be military-issue.

“So, once the Williamsburg Police Department was concerned about it, we decided to err on the side of caution,” Dent said. “If we were 100 percent sure it wasn’t a device, we wouldn’t have evacuated.”

Dent added that it is common for people to tamper with devices, even cigarette lighters.

“We take the necessary precautions to protect the public, and a lot of people are looking up on the internet saying they could tell it wasn’t a real grenade, but it’s not always that simplified,” Dent said.

This is the first incident of its kind that Dent has experienced in the city.

“Our message is to everyone, whether they have military experience or not, just leave it and let us respond to that scene. We have had people transport actual devices in their vehicles, and fortunately none have exploded, but, you know, we don’t want that happening,” Dent said.

The Williamsburg Police Department declined to comment on the situation.

The Williamsburg City Police Department is investigating a possible link between two robberies after a juvenile was arrested and charged with the robbery of a bookbag Sept. 30. The incident was similar to the incident involving a College of William and Mary student held at knifepoint near the Governor’s Inn Oct. 2.

The Sept. 30 robbery, which took place four days prior to the Governor’s Inn robbery but was never reported, came to the attention of the Williamsburg Police during their investigation of the Governor’s Inn knifepoint robbery.

“A person came forward about another person being robbed, and then we found the [stolen] property, which we traced back to the victim, who told us of the robbery,” Williamsburg Police Major Greg Riley said.

Like the second robbery, the first involved a stolen backpack, this time at 1:15 a.m. on the 1200 block of Richmond Rd. near the Bloom grocery store. However, the Sept. 30 robbery involved a single victim and a single perpetrator, while the Oct. 2 crime involved four male perpetrators.

“I know the investigator is looking into possible linkages between the two robberies, but at this point in time, I am not comfortable saying that the two robberies were linked,” Riley said.

Williamsburg Police obtained a warrant Wednesday for the arrest of a juvenile male suspected of robbery. He was taken into custody Thursday and arrested Friday.

Both the victim and the perpetrator were estimated to be of collegiate age. The descriptions and identities of the perpetrators cannot be released due to their ages.

“We are not positive if the perpetrator was a William and Mary student; he was that age,” Riley said.
The victims of neither robbery were reported harmed.