The College is launching a community-wide, year-long initiative, dubbed On the Log, for the 2025–26 academic year, President Maud S. Mandel announced in a Feb. 5 email to the College community.
The initiative will be led by Professor and Chair of classics and Jewish studies Edan Dekel and Professor of Chinese Christopher Nugent and will encompass classes, exhibits, installations, and other yet-to-be-announced initiatives.
The program was conceived through conversations between Dekel and Nugent about the saying attributed to U.S. President James A. Garfield, class of 1856, about former President of the College Mark Hopkins, class of 1824: “The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.”
“[The Log] ends up becoming a symbol for not just Williams but for a certain type of education in America — in particular, [at] small liberal arts colleges: face-to-face one-on-one type interactions,” Nugent said.
Planned programming includes a new designation in the course catalogue, which will highlight classes focusing on “the face to face, the immediate, the ephemeral, [and] the local,” according to Nugent. Additionally, a garden space designed by Assistant Professor of Art Pallavi Sen will be constructed on campus, along with see-saws made of logs.
In an interview with the Record, Nugent said he hopes to involve alums in the initiative, especially after the restructuring of Winter Study in January 2026, which will reduce the teaching load of faculty during Winter Study, opening more teaching slots to alums. “We’re hoping to get a lot of alums back to sit on that log again,” he said.
Other initiatives, including communal crocheting on log benches and “hundreds and hundreds” of Lincoln Logs for students to play with in Paresky, are also in the works, according to Nugent.
Nugent said that he and Dekel, both of whom have been at the College for over 20 years, noticed that the legend of Garfield’s proverbial log — and the emphasis on face to face instruction that it evokes — had fallen out of fashionable conversation in recent years, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. “One of [COVID’s] impacts was distancing people from each other — students from students, students from faculty, faculty from each other, faculty from staff,” he said. “There was real separation that was going on … [and] we felt like some of its after-effects were still there.”
Nugent said that he and Dekel organized the initiative in order to emphasize the importance of in-person learning. “One of the things that came up with COVID is … people out there were saying: ‘Why would you spend so much money on education? You could just do it on Zoom.’ But … you can’t do what we do here on Zoom,” he said.
Nugent also cited the increased use of generative AI in higher education as a catalyst of the project. “I found [it] disturbing … that Harvard was creating a large language model that was going to serve as the teaching assistant for their computer science classes,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘That’s something we would never do.’ We really value that human interaction [at the College].”
“We started to think more concretely about … an initiative that would run over the course of a year [and] engage all parts of the College community, which includes the Williamstown community, students who are here, alums …, faculty, staff, [and] everybody that makes up the log experience,” Nugent said.
Nugent and Dekel envisioned “different kinds of programming … that could focus on … the face to face, the immediate, the ephemeral, the local — the things that make this place special,” he said. Dekel and Nugent then pitched their idea to Mandel and other senior staff.
In contrast to events like Doddceum and the Faculty Meals with Students Program — overseen by the Office of Campus Life and the dean’s office, respectively — On the Log is not sponsored by any one department or office.
“It’s very decentralized,” Nugent said. “One of the things that was important to us is that we didn’t want to add to people’s burdens, and we didn’t want it to cost extra money… What we’ve been saying is, ‘Take the programming that you do every year, and if there are things that you think would work well with [On the Log], direct some of your programming towards that.’”
The initiative will include community members that historically have not been included in the legend of the log, according to Nugent. “One group that felt excluded was staff,” he said. “For many students, the person at the other end of their log is not necessarily a professor. It may well be their supervisor at their job at the library or a dining hall, or their coach.”
On the Log will center programming that is specific to the College’s location. “[The College] plays an outsized role … in Williamstown, so we want the opportunity for people to think about those things as well,” Nugent said. Special Collections will put on an exhibit exploring the College’s relationship with its land. “It’s important to engage with all of those hard conversations [which] are a crucial aspect of the log mythos,” he said.
The current political climate around higher education also motivated Dekel and Nugent to organize On the Log. “Higher education is really under attack … but we wanted to have [On the Log] be part of making a case for what we do here at Williams,” Nugent said.
