Dear Campus Communities,

 

 

 

The question on everyone’s minds these days has been: What are all the construction equipment and industrial vehicles doing on campus? The short answer: Willard College has leased a number patches of campus to one of the nation’s premier natural gas and oil companies. Can Willard provide both a high quality education and premium quality natural gas and oil? Is it safe for our students to have a major extractive industry active on campus? Do we have cafeteria capacity for the additional 300 men who will be stopping in for lunch every day? Yes, we’ve planned for this moment, and Willard is ready to once again show America what a college can be.

Best, Henry Cotton, President

 

Dear Board of Trustees,

 

 

Thank you for the communication concerning Willard and its history. As always, I concur with the conclusions of the Board. Yes, Willard must do better to find a history to confront. True, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Brown, and all the other second-tier schools like the University of Virginia have the whole slavery controversy to play off. Sadly, Willard came into existence after the passage of Amendments 13-15, so we cannot confront our legacy with chattel slavery. We cannot very well hold conferences, or make headlines, about our efforts to “do better” and to “make amends.” With apologies, President Henry Cotton

Willard College is pleased to announce that through a generous donation

fromRamfis Trujillo, Jr., the Ramfis Trujillo Center for National Security Doctrine will be housed  on our campus! For a sense of the intellectual rigour that we can expect from the center, please take a moment to watch this 1961  interview with the donor’s father, Ramfis Trujillo.

Dear Faculty, Please remember to pay close attention when filling out paper work. The Office of Assessment Assessment spent last week evaluating faculty rates of successful paperwork completion. The scores were quite low, with some departments reaching an 85% fail rate for correct and complete paper work.

Kindest regards, Provost Gautleiter

Dear President Cotton,

I was disappointed to hear that FlexFaculty did not have a chance to meet with Gingrich and Associates, during their visit to campus last week. And while we are all pleased to hear that additional ways to stop up revenue leaks and to build a more sturdy financial outlook are being developed that build off last year’s report from the Heritage Foundation, we still cannot help but have some concerns specific to our own unique situation.  Gingrich and Associates recommended that we reframe our financial imperative as part of a deeper move to sustainabilitize campus by reducing our dependence on foreign and polluting oils and gases. And while we laud the Willard College community, including the main  the Harriet Tubman campus, and its decision to reduce use of personal vehicles by charging for parking, we note that this forms a regressive charge on lower paid employees. But of special concern to us is the new credit card controls of the bathroom facilities. Although I have not seen this personally, I understand that most FlexFaculty now bring mason jars to the office in order to relieve themselves. In addition to the humiliation, you would no doubt agree that this presents the campus with issue of hygiene and public health. And these problems are aggravated by the fact that FlexFaculty often share their offices with upwards of 5 to 6 other instructors. I hope we can find a reasonable solution to these challenges.

Sincerely, Hammond Phillip Phillips, PhD

Dear  Howard,

I agree with the sentiment of your recent letter. It was not appropriate for a faculty member outside of English to offer a course on Moby Dick. This was aggravated by the inflammatory title of the course, “Hating Moby Dick: Not Reading Melville in America.” I agree that such a course hardly speaks well of Willard College and it does little to help the embattled humanities. Moreover, it is understandable that a scholar such as yourself, who spent his career publishing books like “Knots: Ropes as Metaphor in Moby Dick” and “Why Were there no Women on the Pequod?: Moby Dick as Degendered Literary Space” would find the “Hating Moby Dick” course a slap in the face.

But let me also remind you that the new Faculty Curriculum Freedom Policy does stipulate that neither the College administration nor individual departments may prevent faculty from teaching any course that meets the basic curricular and assessment requirements. Furthermore, one suspects that you and the professor of record for the course, have what some consider to be a rather long and personal feud.

I hope that the two of you can resolve this without resorting to either mediation, or lawyers, as happened last year. I would also ask that you not send your letter to the New York Times or other media outlets as the topic at hand is not of national concern in anyway that I can discern.

Have a great weekend, Henry Cotton

Dear Colleagues,  The Willard College Educational Excellence Enterprise, Inc. is excited to be collaborating with the Sylvester County Unified School District to begin conducting reading evaluations of all third graders as part of a pilot program with the State Boards of Prisons around the nation to help them better plan for prisons, youth detention facilities, and half-way houses.

Beyond simply using the reading scores to predict incarcerated populations, we hope to develop metrics that can help the state to predict the types of crimes to be committed, while also providing profiles of certain criminal traits.

We have total buy-in from Sylvester County Unified School District, which has implemented a new reading campaign, Third Graders are Readers in Sylvester County Unified School District. Reading and testing materials have been requisitioned through Pearson, the school supplier of choice.

Helping local children to achieve their dreams! And building Willard College brands throughout the nation!

Best, President Henry Cotton

Dear Faculty in the Institute of Human Studies (formerly Departments of English, Anthropology, History, etc),

After years of fundraising, sending out for bids, starting and stopping construction, changing our minds, sending plans back to architects, having the state order a work stoppage to assess the environmental impact on the campus wetlands, conducting intensive asbestos abatement, rebuilding after the two fires, counter-suing the plumbing subcontractor, and locating several hundred misplaced receipts, we finally can announce that the new  Institute of Human Studies Sustainable Educational Systems Complex is operational. Faculty will move in next week!

Please have your offices packed up and emptied by Sunday.

Best, Dean of Facilities, Dr. Guy Quetel

P.S. Remember to renew your elevator and bathroom passes by the end of next week.

Dear President Cotton,

First, I wanted to thank you and the Vice President of Alumni Offices for running a story in the Willard College Lives and Lives! Alumni Magazine about my thirty one  years at the College as a member of the “FlexFax” team. (What a great improvement over “adjunct!”)  You can imagine my surprise in learning that I am the longest surviving FlexFax at the college. With the constant travel to my other places of employment, biannual office moves, the frequent retooling (the summer that I had to learn Chinese and GIS and prepare Introduction to Genetics is a blur), the annual and costly trips to conferences to interview for permanent positions, frequent changes of residence, a failed custody battle, plus the two hour commute home at the end of each day, I lost track of the years!

Willard College has changed since I first arrived. In the early days, it was tricky to figure out which buildings  still housed patients.  And so I’m all the more grateful for the renovated office facilities that came on line since then. All the more reason, then, that I share your concerns about the recent fires. I want you to know that I speak on behalf of all of the FlexFax when I say that we hope the perpetrator of these crimes is quickly apprehended.

Sincerely,

Hammond Phillip Phillips, PhD