The ongoing recession challenged the College of William and Mary leadership Thursday, as the Board of Visitors Committee on Student Affairs hosted presentations from student representatives and Sherman and Gloria H. Cohen Career Center officials focused on efforts to funnel alumni into jobs.

The presentation, a comprehensive report on the center’s programs and connections between students and top-tier employers, was the meeting highlight.

“Since I last talked with you four years ago, two things have happened,” Mary Schilling, Career Center director, said. “One is we’ve had the worst recession since the Great Depression, and the other is we’ve opened a new Career Center. And those things are juxtaposed in our students’ lives. It’s important to know that these are hard times with the job market being what it is.”

Associate Director of the Career Center David Lapinski stressed the positive impact the center has on students. He said personal contact at the center rose 54 percent, total job and internship applications through the center increased 88 percent and student use of the recruiting network went up 28 percent over the last two academic years.

In addition to the usual career fairs, Career Center officials said there are plans for a series of symposia featuring employers from such varied fields as business, publishing, non-profit, government, technology and healthcare delivery.

Board members raised concerns to career center officials about helping alumni find employment.
“How do we coordinate among all the interest groups within our community to find jobs?” BOV member Michael Tang said. “There’s the Alumni Association, there’s the Career Center, there’s Student Affairs, there’s the BOV …we need kind of a wealthy problem-coordinated attack on how to do better.”

The officials responded that talks between such groups are ongoing and that efforts to collaborate with the Alumni Association will be addressed.

Lapinski also talked about a recent data analytics initiative to identify possible improvements the Career Center could make in helping students prepare for the workforce. One of the key findings was that, despite the diversity of majors College students pursue, graduates mainly entered only a handful of fields: education, government, non-profit, healthcare and banking.

“Essentially, it shows that even when you go into some of these other majors, it’s the diversity of the William and Mary education across the arts and sciences, that liberal arts background, that these companies are still coming for all different majors,” Lapinski said. “It doesn’t matter what your major is, you can pretty much go and do anything.”

The Board of Visitors strategic initiatives committee met Friday to discuss initiatives intended to better the College of William and Mary.

“Academic innovation at the College lags behind, and we need to explain what that means and define the board’s role in helping it,” BOV member Robert Scott said, “and we cannot go forward until a few preliminary questions are answered.”

The Strategic Initiatives Committee plays a vital role in the construction and upkeep of the university, deciding what projects need to be implemented. This meeting focused on how to revamp the image of the College.

“We can’t innovate without deciding where to target,” Scott said. “This should be a strategic planning process, and we should aspire to be the best. This will just be empty rhetoric unless we are prepared to support the idea more, because until we have the funding, it is better to be credible.”

The committee proposed many plans for the next five to six years, among which include the design for a new student residence building on campus, the construction of the third part of the Integrated Science Center, new software systems for business practices and the establishment of a Confucius School.

“We’re too often looking at the numbers. We can improve our ‘product’ by adding changes and improvements to the systems, by taking advantage of our combined skill sets,” BOV Timothy Dunn ’83 said.

On Dashboard, a program that compares certain aspects of the College to peer schools such as the University of Virginia, the College lags behind in raw test scores, the student to faculty ratio and a few other categories.

“We have to find better ways of building solid financial footing,” Vice Rector Charles Banks III said. “There is so much brainpower between Richmond and Jamestown Roads that we must be able to find more money and complete more research.”

In order to receive funding, raising tuition was an idea proposed, as well as simply asking the Virginia government for the $4.8 million the school would need to complete the proposed projects.

“Our reality is ahead of our perception,” BOV member Todd Stottlemyer ’85 said. “There are no short term fixes, and I urge you to consider who our customers are. We have lots of stakeholders, but the student is our customer. Center on that student in terms of how to attract more and how we can help maximize their academic success.”

No proposal was reached, although the topic will be addressed again in the December BOV meeting to narrow down exactly what kind of changes need to be made once the members have had the opportunity to speak to deans and boards from other colleges.

A small group of professors from the department of history at the College of William and Mary joined intellectual forces to create the ‘Tyler Lectures’ for the 2011-2012 school year. This year’s topic of discussion is “Nuclear World Controversies.”

The Tyler Lecture Series is an annual lecture series centered on an historical theme, where a few knowledgeable experts on the subject come and talk to students.

“Each year there is a different committee that chooses the lecture topic. This year was professors Frederick Corney and Andrew Fisher and myself,” professor Hiroshi Kitamura said. “We have all been conducting research, have studied issues, or are teaching a course that closely relates to the topic.”

“Nuclear World Controversies” covers the benefits and downsides to nuclear power and its effect on U.S. history.

“Our hope,” Kitamura said, “is that this will encourage people to continue to think about nuclear issues in a much broader scope instead of just storing it in short term memory.”

With the recent post-tsunami nuclear meltdown in Japan, the recent shutdown of a nuclear power plant in Louisa County, Va. and ongoing concern about terrorism and nuclear weapons, the topic is decidedly relevant.

“Nuclear issues cross over many boundaries including physics, environmental science, politics, history and even chemistry. There are so many fields touched by the issue that makes the study of it a forefront issue,” Kitamura said. “Through the lectures you can understand one topic through multiple dimensions.”

Andrew Rotter is a history professor at Colgate University who has conducted research, published many books about U.S. diplomatic history, the Vietnam War and U.S.-Asia relations. Rotter visited the College Sept. 15 and spoke on “Narratives of Bombing: Tokyo and Hiroshima, 1945,” comparing the firebombing of Tokyo to the bombing of Hiroshima.

“I made points about historical voyeurism and exposure, the importance of language and witness,” Rotter said. “And I argued, finally and principally, that bombing was by 1945 part of a continuum of atrocity that started when war planners had decided it was legal, morally acceptable and even merciful to attack non-combatants from the air.”

Professor Katie Brown of University of Maryland-Baltimore County will deliver a lecture entitled “Irrevocable: The Life-Changing, Society-Altering Significance of Plutonium in the U.S. and USSR” Oct. 13 in Andrews Hall.

“The speakers were deliberately contacted and lined up because they are all top authorities in the subject matter,” Kitamura said. “”Like it or not, we live in a nuclear world today. This is why we need to think about its complex effects on our everyday lives and how to deal with it.”

Finally, professor emeritus Lawrence S. Wittner of the State University of New York in Albany will be arriving on campus Oct. 27 to explore “How Peace Activists Saved the World from Nuclear War.” With his recently published book entitled “Confronting the Bomb,” Wittner will be addressing the basic premise that popular protest curbed the nuclear arms race.

Professors and Williamsburg community members gathered in the Commonwealth Auditorium Sept. 26 to provide input for the process of selecting candidates for the Dean of Arts and Sciences.

Organized as an open forum, nine of the 13 search committee members primarily recorded concerns and questions about selecting candidates for the position, occasionally clarifying any confusion that arose about the process or priorities of the dean.

Phil Kearns and Laura Ekstrom, co-chairs of the search committee, began the forum by establishing general details in order to provide background knowledge to pose their questions.

“This is an opportunity for faculty and staff to tell us what they are really looking for in the new dean and for us to gather particular questions to ask in the December round of interviews,” Ekstrom told the audience.

Dr. Aaron H. De Groft, Director of the Muscarelle Museum of Art, posed concerns about where the discussion of a proposed arts complex fell into the selection of the new dean.

“The position description does not call out anything explicitly about any planned project because we didn’t want to preclude anyone by making them think they had to have a line on how to plan XYZ,” Sarah Stafford, professor of economics and public policy and a search committee member, said.

Physics professor Bill Cooke expressed his ideas regarding the candidates’ skills to use funds from the Department of Arts and Sciences to implement projects in these two sectors of the College.

“I would hope that way at the top of your list is the ability for this candidate to negotiate with our president and the provost and to command the respect and cooperation from the other deans of the schools,” Cooke said.

Cooke also advised that the committee ask candidates how they plan to stay plugged into the needs of the faculty, because 50 percent of the job description focuses on fundraising.

One other concern involved the use of a third-party search firm, Auerback Associates, to develop the pool of candidates.

“In my experience as co-chair of the committee to select the provost, all the search firms had stables of candidates who are always on the move, so I would encourage [the committee] to not rely exclusively on the firm and to watch their patterns,” Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Kathleen F. Slevin said.

The committee will decide the top three candidates by Feb. 22. From there, the provost and president will together select the new Dean of Arts and Sciences.

“It was nice hearing broadly based concerns and receive help because we have to satisfy thecommunity at large with this decision,” Kearns said.

Gene Tracey, the current Chancellor Professor of Physics, has served as the interim Dean of Arts and Sciences since July 2011. Tracey replaced Carl Strikwerda, who left the College to become president of Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania.

The arts and sciences is the largest department at the College, with 5,600 students.