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Open Letter to President Tom Ross, Davidson College

Published in Libertas Arts and Literary Magazine, December 2008

Dear President Ross,

I know that you’re working on the Strategic Assessment right now, and I am excited to see what you come
up with after meeting with the faculty and staff. I have been conducting an informal poll of students and
professors to see what changes we would make if we could. These suggestions are meant to be
constructive, feasible improvements on various aspects of Davidson life, and for the most part require
innovation, not increased spending. In no particular order:

1. The Library and other student facilities: The library should stay open 24 hours a day because the
books and computing labs should be available to students 24 hours a day. Librarians cannot be
expected to be on staff around the clock, so the library should add CatCard readers to the main
building and use them to allow access for only students and professors from 1:00-7:00 am.
Furthermore, the library should have book scanners. It seems extremely ironic that tour guides
begin their discussion of the honor code as they exit the library (in order to note the singular
absence of book scanners) when signs on the entrance and exit note the recent laptop thefts and
the library home page prominently features a notice that 320 books are missing. The laptop thief
might be a non-Davidson opportunist and the missing books could be the result of thoughtlessness
alone, but it is time to reevaluate our policies to respond more effectively to these problems. If we
cannot extend the library’s operating hours, we need another facility that is open later than 1 am.
The Union does not have enough computers and is not designed for studying. The 24 hour room is
a dungeon. There has to be a middle ground.

2. Career Services: There are more careers out there for soon-to-be Davidson graduates than
investment banking and Teach for America, but you would not know it from the interview
opportunities advertised in the Crier. The eCareers website is difficult to navigate, and there are
major problems with the way Career Services addresses postgraduate student employment. With a
school full of talented English majors, why are there no major publishing houses conducting
interviews on site? Where are the workshops for students who want to go into journalism,
magazine writing, or other creative writing-oriented careers? Why aren’t our career fairs including
options for our Art History majors, like being scouted for jobs in art galleries, internships at
museums, and positions in fine arts organizations? These are just a few examples of some of the
missing links that Career Services should seek to address. One way to fill in this gap would be to
work more closely with the Alumni Office so that alumni already in the workforce can give recent
graduates a leg up, or at the very least, advice and tips on how to break into certain industries.
Another way would be to host a major Selective Liberal Arts Consortium career fair at Davidson, so
that students would not have to travel to Chicago, Boston, New York, or D.C. for interviews. When I
asked other students what could be improved at Davidson, this was the response given most
quickly and most frequently.
3. Expansion of Course Offerings: This is a goal that could potentially require considerable investment
in new teachers, resources, and facilities, but as an elite liberal arts college, this has to be a top
priority. Given our increasingly globalized world, we should expand the number and variety of
modern languages classes. With the already-proven interest in both English and Neuroscience, we
should offer linguistics classes. The Religion department should offer a Christianity 101 class to
address the varying levels of familiarity with contemporary Christianity, and greater opportunity
to study Islam is certainly appropriate. We should also consider adding new concentrations in Pre-
Law and Architecture/Urban Studies. I’m aware that a liberal arts education does not seek to
provide pre-professional tracking, but with the number of students interested in these fields and
with the Pre-Medical program already firmly instated, it seems reasonable that Davidson should
provide more deliberate and recognizable acknowledgment of a student’s preparation for
postgraduate studies in these areas. Finally, we should add practical courses to better equip
students to work in our technologically-oriented world. Specifically, we should offer classes on
graphic design and website management. These skills are becoming more important and will
probably soon become necessary for anyone seeking employment.

4. The Website: The Davidson website needs to become more aesthetically pleasing and easier to
navigate. There are too many missing links that lead to dead ends in cyberspace, and there is a lack
of visual unity in the graphics for each different tab linked off the site. The athletics page, for
example, has three shades of red and three shades of grey as well as the competing colors of the
photographs. The student life section has four shades of grey. The course catalog has yet another
color scheme and graphic set up, and so does the Web Tree. It should be easier for student
organizations to create websites and link them to the college website.

5. Freshman Orientation/Student Living: As it stands, freshman orientation is infantilizing and


counterproductive. Putting freshmen and upperclassmen in separate dorms creates a false tension
between the two that contradicts the social and academic goals of the college. What I propose is
this: let us integrate freshmen into upperclassmen halls, get rid of the Big Brother/Big Sister
program, eliminate the Hall Counselor position and let RAs handle the hall. The Big Brother/Big
Sister program is a false mentoring relationship that is actually predicated on alcohol—the main
point of the relationship being that the older student provides alcohol for the freshman for First
Night Down, and maybe a friendship will also happen. Why not just put freshman in a situation in
which they will be able to make friends with upperclassmen naturally? RLO’s policy of using
Meyers-Briggs tests to construct a hall full of complementary personalities ignores the rich
potential of spontaneous exchange and misleads freshmen to falsely presume that they will
naturally bond with the members of their hall. Additionally, the freshman dorms become taboo
for upperclassmen and their separation circumscribes areas of interaction and non-interaction.
Upperclassmen do not want to hang out in freshman dorms because it feels creepy and
transgressive, a sentiment that underscores the divisive results of fragmenting the student body by
class. The Hall Counselors are also put in a difficult position because they are expected to act as
surrogate parents for an entire year when that task could easily be mitigated by having more
upperclassmen around for freshman to ask advice from, should they need it. They are also
separated from their friends (and a normal social atmosphere) by living in an all-freshman dorm,
which does not seem like a necessary burden.
6. The Alcohol Policy: This issue is a never-ending source of contention for administrators, students,
and police officers alike. The only aspect of this divisive topic that I would like to talk about is the
relationship between the alcohol policy and social alternatives to Patterson Court. Patterson Court
serves a purpose and it has its niche, but the uneven enforcement of the alcohol policy can
adversely affect students who want to take part in a calmer social scene. As long as we maintain a
reasonable volume, we should be able to gather on the porches of student apartments without
having to register a party several days in advance. We should also be able to have parties in the
dorms as long as these parties are within reasonable expectations of respectful behavior towards
neighbors. We should be able to throw parties with talking, drinking, and music without fear of
legal repercussions. This is part of student life – why is it being discouraged?

7. Community Planning: Let’s have a common hour in which no classes are scheduled to provide a
free period in the middle of the day for meetings, socializing, and eating. Let’s (please!) have a
January term. Let’s work to integrate students and faculty from different departments with more
team teaching and cross-listed courses. Let’s look at how we can promote environmental
sustainability with increased accessibility to public transportation.

These suggestions are food for thought. This is a time when Davidson has an incredible ability to evaluate
its strengths and weaknesses and act strongly to improve the school. We have a new president, an
incredible basketball team, unprecedented media visibility, and the largest freshman class in a long time, if
not ever. We can take advantage of this forward momentum and transform it into tangible improvements.

Sincerely,

Kate Wiseman

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