College of William and Mary Diplomat-in-Residence Mitchell Reiss has been named the 27th president of Washington College in Chestertown, Md. Reiss is also a government and law professor at the College.

Reiss came to the College in 1999 and has served as dean of international affairs, vice provost for international affairs and director of the Wendy and Emery Reves Center for International Studies.

Outside of the College, he worked as then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Director of the Office of Policy Planning. Later, President George Bush selected Reiss to serve as Special Envoy to the Northern Ireland Peace Process.

“I am deeply honored to have been selected as Washington College’s next president,” Reiss said to in a press release. “My time at William and Mary has provided me with the best possible example of what a great liberal arts college should be.”

The City of Williamsburg’s Architectural Review Board ended consideration of the College of William and Mary’s proposed Richmond Road project. The decision follows an appraisal of the project by the board nearly three weeks ago.

“[It was] a big, ugly step backward,” Ed Chappell, director of architectural research at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and former review board member, said.

In October, the William and Mary Real Estate Foundation revealed design plans to bring more retail and housing options close to the College.

The project, which has been in consideration for several years, would construct new College-operated student housing and mixed-use retail options on Richmond Road.

The foundation acquired the properties adjacent to Wawa last year. The site includes the Taylor Building, the former Master Craftsman location and the Thiemes House, which currently serves as the College’s human resources office.

The three buildings are situated on approximately one acre of land that would be cleared for the proposed project. The first floor of the proposed building would contain both shops and restaurants. Upperclassmen would have the opportunity to live in apartments located on the building’s top two floors.

The Office of Residence Life would regulate housing in the 14 apartments. Plans also called for a parking lot that has direct access to Richmond Road that would be reserved for shop patrons only.

The review board objected to the plans to tear down the Thiemes House, however. After examining the conceptual drawings, the board felt that the proposed building did not visually integrate with the surrounding architecture.

Review board members Robert Lane and Lowell Ruff declined to comment on the specific reasons for the proposal’s rejection.

Earlier in the year, the foundation designed the plan for a building that would appropriately fit in an area close to both the College and Colonial Williamsburg. However, the review board questioned architectural and stylistic elements of the proposed design.

“My understanding is the ARB thought the scale of it was a bit large, so now we’re in attempts to redraw,”
College Chief of Staff and Secretary to the Board of Visitors Michael J. Fox said.

Although progress on the Richmond Road project has been set back, Nancy Buchanan, executive director of the real estate foundation, said the process of revising the design with the board’s criticisms taken into account is underway.

“We hope to be back before the ARB at the early December meeting,” she said.

The foundation’s original intention was to break ground next summer and complete the building by the fall of 2011; however, Buchanan said that no firm schedule had been established for presenting the revised project to the Williamsburg Planning Commission.

“We’re all hopeful for a positive decision coming out of the ARB,” Fox said. “The city leadership and our neighbors are all very supportive of the project.”

The Keep Swem Open During Finals Act passed with enthusiasm from most senators during Tuesday’s Student Assembly senate session.

The bill, inspired by College of William and Mary student Daisy Weill ’10, allocates a little more than $2,600 to keep Earl Gregg Swem Library open 24 hours per day during the winter exam period.

“There was no opposition to the bill in the Student Assembly,” bill sponsor and Sen. Erik Houser ’10 said in an e-mail. “It passed unanimously in both committee and the full senate, and everyone was very supportive of the idea.”

There was hope that the bill could pass with minimal funding from the SA. At Tuesday’s meeting, the costs of extra security staff and additional housekeeping hours were determined.

“This all came together, thanks to the hard work and dedication of Swem’s staff,” Houser said. “Twenty-nine employees volunteered to help out, and their hours were moved around to cover the night shifts but still leave them at or under 40 hours per week.”

According to the library website, the extended hours are due to both funding provided by the SA and an outpouring of Swem volunteers.

“Whether this can happen again partially depends on how many students use it this semester,” Houser said.
“The Swem employee on duty will be counting to see how many students are in the library at all times. If it turns out that not very many students are taking advantage of the service, it may not continue in the future.
I’m confident, though, that this will become a permanent fixture at the College.”

The library’s hours will be extended Dec. 6-7, 9-10, and 13-16.

“The Facebook event was created immediately after the bill passed the senate,” Houser, who created the Facebook event with almost 1,670 members in attendence, said. “It is a tool to publicize the effort. I estimate that it has reached at least 3,600 students at this point. Hopefully more will find out through word of mouth.”

Professors and administrators at the College of William and Mary discussed the role of research at the College Wednesday in the second session in “Campus Conversations,” a series of forums sponsored by the College’s Office of the Provost.

The panel of professors, moderated by College Provost Michael R. Halleran, agreed that research-based teaching is beneficial to both the College’s community and its reputation. They also noted that research can give students important hands-on experience in their potential fields of interest.

Marine science professor Mark Patterson said that research on the undergraduate level can have far-reaching benefits beyond a student’s educational enrichment.

“Many of my undergrad classmates engaged in research, and all found it a very positive formative experience, not just those that went on to graduate school and careers as professors,” Patterson said.

Classical studies professor Lily Panoussi said that the College’s unique size means that there are a good number of faculty members and students to work with, but it is still possible to maintain familiarity.

“Students feed off [professors’s] excitement and enthusiasm,” Panoussi said.

She also emphasized the flexibility of education.

“Research means different things to different disciplines,” Panoussi said. “I think that we need to educate each other, as well as our community of students and alumni, as to what research means for each constituency of arts and sciences. I suggest we have an open mind about the nature of research, resist narrow definitions, and most importantly, listen to each other.”

Economics professor Eric Jensen contested the university’s label as a liberal arts university because of large class sizes, but said that the College is also not a research mill.

“Research is necessary at William and Mary … [because] it is what we do,” Jensen said. “It has important implications for faculty quality and, in many disciplines, for the College’s revenue stream.”
Jensen agreed with some audience members that graduate students can play significant roles in undergraduate research.

“Since the arrival of graduate students on the William and Mary campus, there has been a bright, shining line that graduate students could not cross — they cannot teach classes here. Research-based teaching blurs the line somewhat,” Jensen said.

Patterson argued that exploiting graduate students to teach introductory classes such as economics 101 results in poor work.

Interdisciplinary research was emphasized as a way of improving faculty and helping students grow intellectually.

“We want our students to be inspired, and the only way to do that is to share with them our own discoveries, our own excitement about the attainment of new knowledge,” Panoussi said.

Neuroscience professor John Griffin agreed about the importance of student research.

“There are undergrads in my lab right now — hopefully nothing will blow up,” Griffin said. “Undergrads are essential to my culture; they get volumes down, which allows me to request grants for research.”

While making senior theses mandatory for graduation was discussed, Halleran said it was unlikely.

“We want to increase research opportunities, not requirements,” he said.
Panoussi said giving teachers and students credit for research would make research more integral at the undergraduate level.

“It seems clear that if we can sustain a model of strong faculty research blended with intensive, research-based teaching, we will occupy a very desirable niche,” Jensen said.

A chief criticism of proposed in-state tuition increases at the College of William and Mary is that it will decrease Virginians’ ability to afford higher education costs.

As it turns out, a significant number of Virginians could probably afford to pay more than they do now.
According to numbers obtained by The Flat Hat through the Office of Institutional Analysis and Effectiveness and the Office of Financial Aid, 710 of the 1,846 in-state undergraduates at the College who submitted the Free Application for Federal Student Aid for the 2008-2009 school year did not qualify as “needy” for aid.
In fact, the median expected family contribution of those non-needy families was $37,204, just $152 shy of the $37,356 total out-of-state cost of attendance for that year.

The median expected family contribution of the 1,136 undergraduate needy in-state students was $6,420, demonstrating $14,185 in gross need.

As for the approximately 2,100 in-state students who did not submit a FAFSA form, officials say they likely would not have qualified.

“I mean, we don’t know absolutely for certain, but I would assume that people that don’t qualify would have a family contribution even higher thanthose who qualify, even among the no-need who qualify,” Director of Financial Aid Ed Irish said.

Nevertheless, Irish noted that the only statistic the College keeps that might address this question is the Cooperative Institutional Research Program Freshman Survey, which was last administered to the Class of 2012 by the Office of Student Affairs in 2008.

Both Irish and Vice President for Student Affairs Ginger Ambler ’88 Ph.D ’06 warned against drawing any conclusions from this data.

“The CIRP survey would only have captured the information for this year’s sophomore students, and the reported data will be more than a year old — and administered in the summer, prior to the current recession, at that,” Ambler said in an e-mail.

According to a report presented by Ambler April 16, only 54 percent of the members in the Class of 2012 completed the survey.

While financial need has increased in recent years, Irish believes that families’ incomes are exhibiting an upward trend.

“Over time there’s certainly a correlation between academic strength, academic success and family income,” Irish said. “As our academic profile continues to edge up a little better, family income goes along with it.”

The College of William and Mary’s Parking Advisory Committee has recommended that the current grace period for parking in a student spot without a decal before the academic year be eliminated.

During the grace period, students without decals are allowed to park in any student section of a parking lot and not receive a ticket. Other parking citations can still be issued, however.

According to the committee, this period allows students to move and make preparations for the academic year without having to worry about having a parking decal. Student parking decals become available around July 15, and the current grace period extends from the Monday following freshman move-in through Aug. 31.

The committee believes about half of students eligible and able to have a car on campus purchase a parking decal as soon as they arrive on campus, and the remaining 50 percent wait as long as they can. During the grace period, the committee estimated that 65 percent of cars are parked out of their respective scheme — resident, day student or faculty, for example — and Parking Services receives complaints about lack of available parking on campus. Further, when classes begin, parking is difficult and eases when the grace period ends.

“It has a huge impact on normal operations,” Director of Parking Services Bill Horacio said. “We have to provide adequate parking for those who have a decal and properly observe the parking schemes, but people abuse the policy and park in any type of space.”

The committee has recommended that during the grace period, students with no decal should only be able to park in the William and Mary Hall lot. All other areas would be decal enforced.

“While I understand where [the criticism] comes from, I feel the grace period is valuable,” Erik Houser ’10, a committee member and Student Assembly senator, said. “There are some things that students need to do that they might not have a parking pass for, so I was disheartened that the parking advisory committee took this extreme route. Hopefully, in the future, the PAC will be more receptive to student needs.”

The committee hopes to reach a decision by the end of the semester, but no administrators have seen the proposal.

From Nov. 13 to Nov. 23, the City of Williamsburg issued notices of compliance to the tenants, landlords and property managers of nine homes in what was the largest wave of enforcement for the three-person rule in recent memory.

Notices were delivered to 46 students of the College of William and Mary, 23 of whom reside on Matoaka Court. One of the nine houses, 119 Griffin Ave. has already been found in compliance.

“Things are being resolved on a case-by-case basis,” Williamsburg Zoning Administrator Rodney Rhodes said. “Five of the nine are being cleared up, or brought into compliance, or are proving that they are in compliance.”

Of the nine houses, three were given notice because of evidence provided by neighbors or other residents.
For 206 Nelson Ave., 201 Matoaka Ct. and 207 Matoaka Ct., complainants provided Rhodes with detailed logs of parking activity around the houses. These logs, maintained for at least one month each, indicated the residents’ and visitors’ cars by make, model and license plate number. Cars that were parked outside residences regularly were cross-checked with city parking permits, which could be used to establish domicile for the cars’ owners.

_Click to see PDFs of the parking activity logs provided to the city for 206 Nelson Ave., 201 Matoka Ct. and 207 Matoaka Ct._

“I have loved being a member of the Williamsburg community for the past three and a half years, but it is unnerving to find out that we have been watched and disheartening to lose the sense of security I once felt here in Williamsburg,” Shannon More ’10, a resident of 206 Nelson Ave., said in a statement.

Other homes were targeted for investigation after receiving multiple violations of the city’s recently instituted noise ordinance. Of the 10 addresses that have received noise violations since August, two — 219 Harrison Ave. and 207 Matoaka Ct. — have also received notices for the three-person violation.

Chase Hill ’10, a resident of 201 Matoaka Ct., said that the notices came as a surprise to him and his housemates.

“We’ve never had any noise ordinances [or] any citations,” he said. “When I talked to Rhodes today, he told us our neighbor [basically] ratted us out.”

The log for 201 Matoaka Ct. is one of the most detailed. E-mails from the complainant, whose identity was redacted, to Rhodes discuss the number of cars regularly parked outside the house, as well as the frequency of overnight visitors. The complainant further requested weekly written reports from the Williamsburg Police Department regarding incidents that occur on Matoaka Court from Major Susan Geary.

The complainant also forwarded the names of students who had indicated to neighbors that they would be having a party at 207 Matoaka Ct. for the express purpose of adding their names to a list of residents of the home. The investigation of 207 Matoaka Ct. was ongoing at the time.

Several students have already proven they are not residents of the disputed houses. For Camilla Hill ’11, a resident of 219B Harrison Ave., this is the sixth time the city has confused her address for 219 Harrison Ave., the house next door.

“The City of Williamsburg has been harassing these people [of 219 Harrison Ave.] non-stop,” Camilla Hill said. “I feel that they’re being incredibly sneaky and conniving about this.”

Other students who received notices that Rhodes believes are not in violation are Heather Bryant ’10, Tamara Sweetnam ’11, Megan Burke ’12 and Hailey Hewitt ’12.

In Monday’s meeting between city staff and Student Assembly leaders, Mayor Jeanne Zeidler emphasized that three-person complaints are investigated whether the violators are students or non-students, and that the ordinance is in no way directed at the College’s off-campus student population.

“We must enforce our ordinances,” she said. “And that’s what’s happening.”

As the Jan. 5, 2010 deadline for compliance approaches, students who are currently living in violation of the ordinance are working toward finding alternative housing options.

“The three people who are on the lease are the three people that are going to be living there,” Chase Hill said.

Chase Hill’s roommates who are not on the lease have found another off-campus location.

“Honestly, we came into the situation knowing we [would be violating the zoning ordinance],” Carl Watts ’10, a resident of 201 Matoaka Ct., said. “But the situation we’re in is different than the situation we came in with.”

_Click here to read a From the Newsroom blog post about why The Flat Hat has reported the names of alleged three-person rule violators but not the complainants who submitted evidence to the city._

The newly proposed coal-fired power plant in Surry, Va. dominated the discussion between College of William and Mary students and various panelists yesterday at the SEAC-sponsored “Focus the Nation” environmental talk.

Three discussions were held nationwide; the other two were in Mary, Louisiana and Washington, D.C. Focus the Nation is a non-profit group based in Portland, Ore., which strives to promote climate change awareness through civic engagement, according to their website.

Panelists included former Virginia House of Delegates member Brian Moran, Chelsea Harnish, regional coordinator for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, Al Weed, executive director of Public Policy and Board of Trustees member on Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s Virginia Land Conservation Foundation, and Dr. Alaric Sample, CEO of the Pinchot Institute for Conservation.

The forum began with a presentation from each panelist about their strategies for educating people on the negative effects of a coal-fired power plant.

Harnish, who was instrumental in creating wind farms off the coast of Cape Cod, Mass., discussed the economic and environmental negative effects of a coal-power plant.

“Burning coal not only contributes to global warming, but the production and transportation of coal is destroying the lives, the culture and the homes of our friends in the Appalachian Mountains,” she said.

Harnish also cited several news clips which reported that the price of coal — and, consequently, the price of coal-powered electricity — had risen by a large amount in the past few years.

“We’re talking about public policy, and public policy is always a matter of choices,” she said.

Weed addressed possible solutions to the problem.

Forty percent of all coal burned in Virginia was also mined in Virginia, but the mining industry only produces about 4,000 jobs per year.

“We’re actually a pretty lousy coal-producing state,” he said.

Weed also said that “Clean Coal,” a process to sequester carbon dioxide out of coal to make it burn cleaner, is also not feasible with current technology.

“I am becoming increasingly convinced that if we don’t really do something about conservation and efficiency, all that we do in alternative energy is marginal,” he said.

He also proposed biomass power plants, which generate power based on biological materials such as wood, waste and alcohol fuels, as a better alternative for the state.

Sample spoke about the establishment of several environmentally based policy groups within the state and U.S. government. He addressed Gov. Kaine’s ongoing efforts to sign international environmental treaties, due to a lack of national coherence in relation to environmental policy.

Moran discussed the public policy aspect of the coal plant. He said that the lack of a market for alternative energy is a large impetus behind companies like Dominion Virginia Power not adopting renewable energy. He said that offshore wind power could easily be taken advantage of as opposed to offshore oil drilling, which is currently the main focus off Virginia’s coastlines.

“If we can successfully construct [a wind farm] off of Cape Cod, we can certainly do it for Virginia Beach,” he said.

Moran also cited several obstacles for proponents of renewable energy. The lifestyle that coal plays in southwest Virginia, where generations of people have mined coal, was one of the hurdles he mentioned.

“[Coal] has become a part of [southwest Virginia’s] culture and traditions,” he said, referring to the act of mining and the industry itself.

In the end, Weed said that promoting environmental conservation inherently lies in the power to change people’s minds and behavior about renewable energy.

“What they don’t know is how to change their own behavior,” Weed said. “Until electricity becomes much more expensive and until we benefit from reducing energy use, we are pushing against a flood — we are not going to get there.”

Samantha Casey ’10 was crowned Miss Virginia USA 2010 Nov. 21. The Jeffersonton, Va. native will spend the next few months gearing up for the National Miss USA Pageant to be held in Las Vegas April 18.

Despite her fame as a pageant queen, there is more to Casey than her recently acquired title.

Contrary to many pageant contenders who enter their first pageants as children, Casey did not begin competing until the age of 14. Instead, she spent her time studying and playing varsity basketball and tennis.

“It’s the last thing I ever thought I’d be doing,” Casey said. “I was a huge tomboy in high school.”

Her first pageant was a state-wide competition, a huge undertaking for an untried contestant. Casey said that preparing for the event was more intense than she had first realized, but she came to enjoy the challenge of pushing herself to new physical and mental limits.

“I really enjoyed the competitive part about it,” she said. “It was different than anything I had done before.”

In 2006, Casey was crowned Miss Teen Virginia, and she went on to become third runner-up at the national Miss Teen USA competition.

At the College, she became involved in the social sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma and Love146, an organization dedicated to the prevention of child sex-trafficking. After becoming an avid supporter and spokesperson for the group, Casey’s desire to promote the program motivated her to pursue another pageant crown.

“I was able to see how much the Miss Virginia title opens doors to help charities,” she said.

The national pageant will consist of swimsuit and ball gown competitions as well as personal interviews. Judges will select five finalists after rounds of on-stage questioning.

While she admitted that the stereotype of pageant queens is less than flattering, she said that winning a title is not easy. She usually spends between 18 and 21 hours in the gym each week, training for the physical aspect of the competition.

Casey is also preparing for the interview portion of the competition. She confesses to being a “news junkie,” and says she consistently stays on top of current events through television, radio, internet and newspapers. She also trains with a family friend who is involved in politics to hone her public speaking skills.

Casey is excited about the new turn she claims the Miss USA Pageant has taken. She believes the competition has become less about beauty and designer clothes and more focused on academics, talents, and communication skills. The contenders must now display a greater grasp of current events and world issues.

Although preparing for the Miss USA competition dominates her time, Casey is adamant that pageants do not rule her life. She plans to continue pursuing a degree in business after the upcoming pageant and is considering careers in commercial real estate and environmental awareness.

“I look at myself as much more academic and athletic than as just a pageant queen,” she says, “I look at myself as a career woman, and I am looking forward to getting into the business world. This [pageant] is one of the things that I’ve been blessed to experience in my life, but it’s not my life.”

If Casey wins the Miss USA title, she will go on to compete in the Miss Universe pageant.

If she does not win she believes that this will be her final pageant.

The Miss USA Pageant will air April 18.