The College is renewing its contract with the Mystic Seaport Museum to continue the Williams-Mystic Program — a semester-long study away program in maritime studies — for three more years, President Maud S. Mandel and Executive Director of Williams-Mystic Tom Van Winkle announced in an all-campus email on Friday.
Mandel and Provost Eiko Siniawer announced in April that the College was considering closing the program at the end of June 2025 due to decades of low enrollment numbers and high expenses, prompting fervent outcry from the program’s faculty, students, and alums.
Siniawer wrote to the Record on May 1 that the conversations about the nonrenewal of the contract followed years of low interest from students at the College. She noted that the College sends around 10 students to Williams-Mystic each year, while dedicating five faculty members, five staff members, and “substantial” financial resources.
Van Winkle largely spearheaded efforts to keep the program alive, emailing current and former Williams-Mystic students, faculty, and staff on April 28 to alert them that the College’s senior staff was considering discontinuing its partnership with the Mystic Seaport Museum and to urge them to voice support of the program.
If the College did not renew the contract, Van Winkle told the Record in May, the Williams-Mystic Program — which welcomes study-away students from a variety of colleges and universities — would effectively close.
A petition for the College to extend the decision timeline regarding the future of the program and renew its contract with the Mystic Seaport Museum collected 570 signatures.
In an open letter to the College published in the Record on May 8, the Williams-Mystic Class of Spring 2024 — composed of students at the College and nine other institutions of higher education — affirmed the value of the program, claiming that shutting it down would be a “serious mistake.”
In response to “hundreds of expressions of concern and desire to help from Program alumni and supporters, on campus and beyond,” the College established the Working Group on the Future of the Williams-Mystic Program, which included faculty and staff at the College and staff at the Mystic Seaport Museum, Mandel wrote in her email on Friday. The working group spent the summer generating a proposal to improve the program’s financial sustainability.
After reviewing the working group’s proposal — which Mandel said included “careful cost reductions, new recruitment and enrollment measures and viable fundraising strategies” — she and Van Winkle decided to renew the College’s partnership with the Mystic Seaport Museum for three more years.
In her email, Mandel expressed gratitude for the efforts of members of the working group. “On behalf of the college and Williams-Mystic, we are excited to jointly support the continuation of this exemplary experiential and interdisciplinary liberal arts program,” she wrote.
