Letter from Ross Cheit '77

Professor William Wagner

Dean of the Faculty

Williams College

Williamstown, MA                                                                            January 9, 2011

Dear Dean Wagner,

I graduated from Williams in 1977 with a first-rate education that prepared and inspired me to become an academic. I have been teaching at Brown University since 1986, where I am a tenured member of the Political Science department. I was the first professor to receive a junior endowed chair at Brown—the Ittleson Chair in Environmental Studies. I am proud of my accomplishments in research and writing, but I have been most successful at Brown as a teacher. I was the youngest faculty member ever to receive the Hazeltine Citation for Excellence in Teaching; I am the only member of the Brown faculty who has received that award (voted by the students) and the McLoughlin Award for Teaching (awarded by the administration). Last year, I was one of two professors (out of more than 500) to receive the Karen Romer Prize for Advising and Mentoring.  I know that what I do makes a tremendous difference in the lives of my students, and it is no exaggeration to say that Sheafe Satterthwaite has been a primary influence in my success.

I was a coordinate major in Environmental Studies at Williams. I took three courses from Sheafe and I did a Winter Study project under his supervision. Sheafe is the only professor at Williams with whom I have stayed in contact over all these years. His intellectual friendship has been extremely important to me. He has followed my career with great interest and he has consistently suggested useful readings when I talk to him about my teaching. More importantly, he had a major influence on how I view the world. I know that he was never a comfortable fit in Environmental Studies, but his unusual perspective on the world helped open my eyes in various ways. Sheafe was willing to challenge the orthodoxy of environmentalists and he had a special way of appreciating things that others might overlook. I still make connections and observations with Sheafe in mind.

His personal connection with students is extraordinary and, in my experience, quite rare in the academic world. The people I stay in closest touch with from my years at Williams all have one thing in common: we were students of Sheafe Satterthwaite.  Indeed, Sheafe has referred students to me over the years who are working on projects at Williams that have some connection to my areas of expertise. While I generally beg off any requests from students at other institutions, I always make time for students who have studied with Sheafe. One reason is that this is a small way in which I can acknowledge and try to repay my intellectual debt to Williams and to Sheafe. Another reason is that his students are invariably interesting. Indeed, I am taking a current Williams student to dinner tomorrow night because she contacted me about a Rhode Island-based project that she is doing for Sheafe.

I am writing, then, because I have just heard through another former student of Sheafe’s that his contract for next year has not been renewed. I hasten to add two things. First, Sheafe did not contact me and he does not know that I am writing this letter.  Second, I know that it is highly unusual to write an unsolicited letter to the Dean of the Faculty of any other institution in connection with any kind of hiring or contract issue. I certainly have not written a letter like this in my twenty-four years in academia.

But Sheafe Satterthwaite has been so important to my intellectual development and my teaching career that I could not resist writing this letter. I know that institutions like Williams and Brown care deeply about their students and their alumni. I do not know whether you fully appreciate how much goodwill Sheafe has created for Williams and how many of us love the institution in large part because of our experience with him.  How could you know? I have never really had an occasion to express what I have put in this letter. And I suspect there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of alums who could write something similar.

Sheafe Satterthwaite is an extraordinary resource and he is part of what made Williams special from my point of view. He is the kind of professor who inspires students and alumni in ways that are difficult to measure. I always assumed that we would have the chance to explain this and to honor him and the institution on the grand occasion of his retirement. That seems unlikely to happen if his career ends with an abrupt non-renewal.

With all of this in mind, I hope that you can find a way to retain Sheafe for another year or two so that he can retire in a fashion that preserves the reservoir of goodwill that he has created towards Williams and that honors the remarkable number of ways in which he has inspired students over forty years. You can count on me to assist in that effort in any way possible. I greatly appreciate your consideration in this matter.

Sincerely,

Ross E. Cheit 

Associate Professor

Political Science & Public Policy