Copy, paste and edit the following freely.
Decide who you want to contact. Start your message with a sentence telling them who you are and why you’re a stakeholder:
“My name is [Lord Botetourt] and I’m an alumna/us1 and donor from the Class of XXXX. I’m sharing my concerns with you about where the College of William & Mary seems to be heading, and my fears that it is amidst an institutional identity crisis.”
Then paste in a message, as outlined below. Edit freely.
For the Board of Visitors
bov@wm.edu
Content to customize:
One after another, decisions made by leadership are erasing the unique things about the College. Our ranks have been slipping, and this seems to have sent W&M leadership into a panic.
Undoubtedly, you feel pressure to shape W&M to better resemble the larger public research universities that have leapfrogged us in the rankings, so we can regain some prestige. Restyling ourselves as a “public research university” — the current approach — will do none of that. It’s not working.
William & Mary’s prestige cannot come from research spending or “preeminence”: it comes from its people — people who choose a small scale, close relationships with faculty, and a campus community with no equal. If we try to look and act like just another university, will the right kinds of people find us?
I want to see W&M stand alone and proud in the higher-education marketplace and in the hearts and minds of its community. In a thick forest of fear and conformity, let’s re-emphasize our unique strengths. Don’t let the Board of Visitors or the Brafferton erase the College’s distinctiveness.
For Strategic Planning
wmstrategicplan@wm.edu
Content to customize:
William & Mary is at a critical juncture as it plans for the next quarter-century. Our plan itself, however, is a misunderstanding of what makes the College special.
You have hired Huron Consulting to help guide this process. But they do not understand us. They have marched from campus to campus, recommending cuts to staff, layoffs for faculty, and “reimagining” beloved institutions all over America. They suggest quadrupling research spending at William & Mary, which has no medical or engineering school. To do this here would be transformative and likely disfiguring.
The College of William & Mary does not need this “reimagining.” We know who we are. Nobody else offers both a small, intimate community of learning and a public school environment. There is a very good reason your search for peer institutions was a struggle. In this lane, there is only us.
My fear is that a consultant like Huron merely provides cover for the “reimagining” of William & Mary that is sadly already in progress. If this strategic plan is to guide the next decades of the College’s evolution, we must conduct it with the soul of William & Mary — small and smart, great and public — close at heart.
It’s not too late to recommit to what makes us truly unique: a small and friendly place where brilliant students learn and do research alongside world-class faculty.
- Only because people get mixed up: an alumnus is a male graduate of the College; an alumna is female. Male or mixed plural is alumni; female plural is alumnae. If those descriptors don’t work for you, blame the Romans and do whatever feels right. ↩︎