VARIETY // Taking club sports to new heights p. 5
The Flat Hat
Vol. 102, Iss. 5 | Tuesday, September 11, 2012
The Twice-Weekly Student Newspaper
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of The College of William and Mary
academics
9/11 memorial
Class unearths College’s past Possible 18th century school found bY ken lin Flat hat assoc. news editor
all photos by katherine chiglinsky / THE FLAT
Flags sprinkled the grass of the Sunken Gardens where members of both the Young Democrats and Young Republicans gathered on Monday night to plant flags. The groups met on the eve of the 11-year anniversary of September 11, 2001 to show their bipartisan remembrance of those who lost their lives that day.
There is no shortage of historical artifacts beneath the College of William and Mary grounds, and the newest discovery involves the College’s complicated history with slavery. After hours of research and field work over the summer, a joint College and Colonial Williamsburg effort is close to determining the fate of the earliest school for African Americans. “It was nice to do something outside of my major,” public policy major Steven Morley ’13 said. “It was just really exciting to find anything. Then you have a mystery because you don’t know if what you found was from the era. And if you did [find something], then you added to the theory that the school was there.” The journey began eight years ago when English professor Terry Meyers, the driving force behind the project, read about a Williamsburg house rented out to an England-based charity, the Associates of Dr. Bray, for the purpose of educating African American children. The school operated from 1760 to approximately 1774, and over the next two centuries, the building underwent several renovations and a move before disappearing from the historical record. “One of the things that interested me was the possibility that the structure had been used for the religious education of black children, both free and enslaved, and then I discovered the College had sent two of its children to the school after it moved,” Meyers said. “The two children were named Adam and Fanny, and suddenly, slavery at the College had a face.” Meyers traced the building’s location to the current Military Science building. Through the efforts of the Bray School Archaeological Project, supervised by assistant professor of anthropology Neil Norman and Colonial Williamsburg Foundation See bray page 3
administration
williamsburg
Reevaluating credits Community college leaders share experience Report questions use of credits
by vanessa remmers flat hat managing editor
by Katherine chiglinsky flat hat news editor
Whitney Shephard ’14 transferred from Tulane University to the College of William and Mary after her freshman year. As a publichealth-major-turned-kinesiology-major, she enrolled in Cell Biology at Tulane to knock off one of her pre-med requirements. But as she sent course descriptions about her classes at Tulane to the College, she realized that not all of her credits would transfer fully. “There was one class that they didn’t give me credit for at first,” Shephard said. “I emailed the Registrar, and I sent in the course description, and they ended up giving me credit for the course. I would advise any transfers to look over their transcript and say, ‘Wait a minute, this doesn’t look right.’” “Cracking the Credit Hour,” a new report written by Amy Laitinen for the New America Foundation, proposes that the typical credit hour fails to measure a college education accurately. As shown by the number of credits that fail to transfer, colleges often do not recognize the credit system as a representation of the knowledge students bring with them to their new institutions. Designed by Andrew Carnegie to increase pensions for college professors, the credit hour dates back to the late 1800s as the primary unit of measurement. While discussing the “Carnegie Unit” in its 1906 report, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching stressed that the unit only measured time and not knowledge or results attained. Schools now rely on credits to gauge a student’s progress at college. Students at the College are required to complete 120 credit hours to graduate. The College is also a member of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, which requires use of credit hours. See credits page3
Index
News Insight News Opinions Variety Variety Sports Sports
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Leaders and Mayor brief students and residents on city issues
Today’s Weather
Sunny High 78, Low 56
Members of the Neighborhood Relations Committee discussed the expanding role of community colleges and received a report by Mayor Clyde Haulman at their monthly meeting Saturday. John Dever, president of Thomas Nelson Community College, briefed the 15 to 20 member committee on the transferoriented college and the importance of affordability for many transfer students who end up at the College of William and Mary. “Our relationship with the College was a bit rocky in the past, but through Gene Nichol’s, then College President Taylor Reveley’s administration, I am glad to say that we now have a very good relationship,” Dever said. Of the 214 transfer students that enrolled in the College this year, 78 came from the community college system. Dever noted that about 25 transfers were from TNCC. “Most of our students intend to graduate with an associate’s degree and move on toward a four-year college,” Dever said. “I can say, no offense to William and Mary, that a community college class does give students a lot of diverse perspectives. You’ve got people from many different stages in life in one classroom.” Though TNCC increased its tuition this
file photo / THE FLAT HAT
Students met with members of the Williamsburg community at a Neighborhood Council meeting in April.
year, like the rest of the community colleges in Virginia, Dever added that the quality education and the $199 per credit-hour cost partly accounted for the 2.9 percent
Inside opinions
Why credits don’t determine real world knowledge
When we place too much emphasis on credit hours and grades, we don’t learn the skills that we need after graduation. page 4
enrollment increase last year, a trend that has remained steady for over 10 years. See neighborhoods page 3
Inside SPORTS
Football falls in home opener
A sluggish offensive performance in a game interrupted for 80 minutes due to lightning left the College in a hole it couldn’t dig out of and the Tribe fell to Lafayette, 17-14. page 8