As you know, the College is tiny. One of the greatest advantages of going to a small, remote college like Williams is the opportunity to get to know many of our peers deeply — in the library, in the coffee shop, or in the dining hall. But even though small town living, by its nature, creates a tight-knit community, there are still so many people on campus that I don’t know at all.
An op-ed in the Record last week by Alex Farman-Farmaian celebrated varsity sports teams as microcosms of academic diversity. It raised good points about the importance of branching out, crediting team culture for intellectual exploration.
While some teams may reflect the College’s academic breadth, many do not. Further, academic diversity is just one component of the campus’s overall diversity — we are surrounded by accomplished poets, anglers, baristas, EMTs, and more, from all over the world.
Insular athletic culture on campus creates a social divide that hinders the intellectual well-roundedness that the College touts.
There are two possible reasons for this divide between athletes and non-athletes: Either people are satisfied with the cliques that were all but waiting for them when they came to the College, or we are interested in meeting new people but don’t know how.
I hope that the latter is the case. Many factors contribute to smaller social circles, the most obvious being convenience. Varsity athletes spend a lot of time with their teammates — lifting, traveling, and playing time add up. Naturally, they grow especially close, often eating meals and living together. The world shrinks a little in the process. This happens to everyone as we settle into routines and friendships in our new lives away from home.
A problem, however, arises when these friend groups don’t expand. If students still want to meet new people after the first few weeks or months at the College, where can they find them? Athletes’ participation in the arts and non-pre-professional clubs is rare, as practices and rehearsals are both time-consuming. Surely, then, parties must be where the school mixes, right?
Not quite.
I love a good Williams party as much as the next person, and while you may occasionally meet a new romantic fling — or the love of your life — most of the time, we go to jump up and down with the friends we came with, or at least classmates we already know.
Organizing parties often lies in the hands of sports teams, which occupy most of the Hoxsey Street houses, and typically remain fairly exclusive. While mixers between teams are common, by the time a party opens up to other students, the meeting-new-people thing is mostly over.
This can be restricting for athletes as well. A friend on the lacrosse team told me that frequently mixing with the same teams has grown tiring, and his teammates often opt for team movie nights rather than going out.
How, then, do we unify our campus community?
The administration needs to make some systemic changes. For instance, Team Eph, an orientation program solely for athletes on fall sports teams, creates a social fork as soon as first-years get to campus. Given that WOOLF backpacking trips are only away for two nights, and other EphVentures have even more flexibility, joining the rest of their class during this formative period seems worth the time taken away from preseason training. Instead of dividing incoming classes as soon as they arrive, First Days should be designed so that fall athletes can meet future classmates, clubmates, and suitemates.
Another place of division is upperclass housing. Sports teams dominate off-campus housing because they are often the only students who can form a group big enough to sign a lease years in advance.
Perhaps the College could acquire some of the buildings frequently used as off-campus housing and turn them into co-ops, especially as existing co-ops become increasingly difficult to get into. This would level the playing field, enabling more students to host large social events.
As for our role as students, I think we need to create more low-pressure social environments where we have the chance to meet new people. I’m talking board games — big time. Does that happen often at the College? My sense is that it doesn’t. The casual hanging out I do is almost always with my housemates and in procrastinative ambivalence. I sense that this is true for others too. We’re all busy, and we all have a problem set due tomorrow in perpetuity. Meeting new people takes time, energy, and planning, which can feel like a burden for stressed-out students with already-full plates.
Plus, talking to strangers carries the risk of awkwardness. While this may seem scary, it can also be fun. Learning how to navigate differences will be necessary when we leave cow-town for the rest of the world. We have infinite chances to mess up and try again as long as we are here, because, for better or worse, campus is too small to avoid people forever. I’ve been trying to sit down at meals with new faces more often, and while it can be daunting, it’s also exciting and surprising.
I’m not saying that every social gathering will succeed, nor should they all be open to the whole school. But I am saying that we need more opportunities for all sorts of groups — both non-athletes and athletes — to socialize outside of their respective social cliques. What about a “WCFM x hockey” mixer? I’m only mostly kidding.
Or, what if there were places where students could shed the identities determined by their extracurriculars and meet solely as young people living in 2025? I envision squash players with mock trial moguls with theater students. I know just reading that might be testing the limits of your imagination, but we’ve got to give it a shot.
Just by being here, we have so much in common, far beyond which clubs we participate in or what team we play on. I know that there are football players who like jazz and art majors who like sports out there. If we haven’t normalized having a wide variety of interests, our liberal arts education is failing.
Our mission statement reads: “Encountering differences is at the heart of the educational enterprise.” We are here to learn from each other, in addition to our classes. How can our differences be at the heart of this College if we — its students — are not encountering them?
I am under no utopian illusion that everyone at the College will instantly become best friends. But, I think we are all ready to extend our antennae. Little by little it’s already happening in my year, as friends go abroad and we venture out of the social shells we worked so hard to construct as first-years.
We are elastic. We all want community, and the College is small enough to be its own club. Let’s mix it up.
Felix Barman ’27 is from Brooklyn, N.Y.
