Letter from Matthew Jeffers '98

From: Matthew Jeffers ‪<mjeffers98@gmail.com>‬

Date: Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 12:42 PM

Subject: Sheafe Satterthwaite's contract decision

To: william.g.wagner@williams.edu

Dear Dean Wagner:

As an alumnus of Williams, I recently received the sad news that Sheafe Satterthwaite's contract has not been renewed for the 2011-12 academic year, and I am writing to you because I feel that this decision - for whatever reason it was made - shows great disrespect for the impact that Sheafe's teaching has had on multiple generations of students over the past four decades.  It is no exaggeration to say that this is the worst news I have heard from the Purple Valley since I graduated in 1998.

As anyone who has taken a course from Sheafe will tell you, he is full of quirks, unusual interests, and non-traditional teaching methods -- and it is exactly these points that have made Sheafe such an asset to the Williams community.  Perhaps the thinking now is that the college has out-grown its need for an instructor who truly challenges his students, takes them out of their comfort zones, and helps them encounter knowledge outside of the classroom.  Perhaps a number of students have given him poor evaluations because they want to sit in a huge lecture without interacting with their instructor.  Perhaps Sheafe's courses have seen a decline in enrollment, although I would find this very hard to believe.  It's difficult to speculate on the reasons behind the contract decision, but I am fairly confident that it was a change in the college, and not in Sheafe, that was the driving factor here.  To my knowledge, Sheafe's teaching has been unwavering.  Assuming I am right on this -- the question then becomes what kind of evolution (devolution?) the college and the Art Department have gone through that doesn't leave room for Sheafe's courses -- which have been a constant for the previous four decades?  This constant was, for me and hundreds of other students, one of the defining aspects of the Liberal Arts Experience at Williams.

This brings me to another reason that Sheafe was such an asset to the Williams Community -- namely, the detail, effort, and care that he put into his commentary on student papers.  Students come to Williams, rather than a larger college, because they want to receive personal attention from their instructors, not their teaching assistants.  This has always been part of the "Williams Brand" ... and when it comes to the professors who embody this "brand", Sheafe is in a class by himself.  He put so much effort into his feedback on class assignments that I sometimes wondered how he was able to do it with only 24 hours in a day, and yet from all reports I have heard, he did this consistently, for every student, on every assignment, across every course, every year.  No other instructors I have ever had, at Williams or elsewhere, ever came close to providing such insightful and in-depth feedback.  Sheafe took his relationship with his students seriously -- he remembered everything they had written, followed their improvements across multiple assignments, and helped them address their development areas and emerge successfully at the end of each course.  Has the student body changed so much in recent years that they no longer see value in this? 

As you can tell, the paragraphs above are my own counter-argument to a decision that has already been made.  But this decision can be changed, and it is not too late.  Out of pure respect for Sheafe's many years of service -- I would hope that in your role as Dean of the Faculty, you can step in, strike a compromise, and allow Sheafe to leave on his own terms -- perhaps within a window of 3 years instead of six months.  At 71, he cannot be far from retirement, and for this reason, the decision around Sheafe's contract strikes me as political more than anything else.  If you have read this far in my letter, I would hope that you are also reading the other letters that you have been receiving -- and that you can at least understand the impact this decision has had on the broader Williams community, not to mention Sheafe himself.  When multiple letters are being sent, all personally written, by alumni across several decades -- even a biased observer could tell you that something is amiss.

If you have a few minutes to reply and help me understand a bit more about why and how the college came to this decision, I would be very grateful -- because as you can tell from the feelings I have expressed here, I see no reason, objective or subjective, why Sheafe cannot be given the chance to close out his career at Williams on his own terms.

Sincerely,

Matthew S. Jeffers '98

Boston, Massachusetts