Cult of the Purple Cow

No, it’s not another spoof religion like the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and it’s not a real religion for people to get outraged over. The title refers to my college alumni organization– Williams uses a cow as the unofficial mascot, and the school colors are purple and gold, so little purple cows are all over everything. But as Kate has noted many times, there’s a certain cult-like air surrounding Williams alumni (she only married into the cult).

It’s sort of hard to explain what I’m talking about, but possibly the best example is the story of the Alumni Review. Many colleges and universities (Union, Maryland, and Yale included) publish alumni magazines, highlighting the achievements of various graduates of that college, and offering glossy articles about things going on on campus. The idea is to make people feel a continued connection to the school, so that they’ll give more money.

It’s not unusual for these magazines to feature a “Class Notes” section, a collection of material that particularly connected alumni send in about what they’re doing. You get a smattering of wedding photos, stories of births and deaths and job changes, and the occasional picture of a group of alumni who ran into each other in some interesting place. Williams’s Alumni Review used to do the same thing, but a year or so ago, they stopped doing that, and splite the Class Notes off into an entirely separate publication. We get the standard alumni magazine four times a year, and the Class Notes three times a year.

(More cultishness below the fold.)

I found a copy of the Alumni Review from before the split lying around my office at home, and the standard glossy profile stuff runs about 32 pages– conincidentally, the same length as the Maryland alumni magazine that arrived this week. The Class Notes run 63 pages. There are seven full pages of nothing but wedding pictures. Every class from 1936 on has a little report from the class secretary, and there are entries for the classes of 1929, 1932, and 1934 as well.

The first post-split issue (also lying on my desk) is published in a smaller format– a little bigger than half of an 8.5×11″ sheet of paper cut the lon way– and runs 136 pages. And this isn’t just filler stuff– the Class of 1932 report mentions news from or about a dozen different people, and the Class of 2004 (the most recent reporting then) mentions 110. This is out of a class of roughly 500.

It’s really almost scary how good they are at getting people to stay in touch. And how good their information gathering apparatus is. When Kate and I got married, there were probably a dozen friends of mine from Williams in attendance. Due to a problem with the photographer, we never did end up sending in a wedding picture, but three or four months after the wedding, I got a letter from the Society of Alumni saying “Congratulations on your recent wedding, and please tell us more about your new spouse.” There was a questionnaire in the envelope as well, asking about Kate’s name and job and educational background.

I was surprised that they knew about it, but said “That’s silly,” and threw the questionnaire away. And I got another one a few months later. And another a few months after that, and eventually I filled one out just because I felt bad for whoever had to keep stuffing those envelopes.

There’s a joke I heard once about an alumnus who got busted for some sort of Mafia-type crime, and went into the Witness Protection Program. They gave him a new identity, and relocated him to a different city, and when he moved into his new house, he found a letter in the mailbox, addressed to his new name, from the alumni association asking for money. I could almost believe it.

Of course, the college isn’t in this business for the warm-fuzzy feeling of keeping classmates in touch with each other. It’s a huge money-making oepration. I don’t recall the most recent figures, but when I was in school, the 50th reunion classes gave an average of about $10 million every year (they announce the fundraising totals for each class on the reunion weekend). More recent classes don’t give quite that much, of course, but classes that are ten years out give something like $100,000 every year. The amount of money they collect from alumni donations is just mind-boggling, and those are just the routine donations– when they really crank things up, they do things like a $450 million capital campaign.

It’s also important to note that this isn’t entirely a triumph of marketing. They’re remarkably good at collecting money from people, but it wouldn’t work if people didn’t feel a real connection to the school. I remain close with a bunch of my classmates, and we still get together at least once a year. The first eight years I was out of college, I went back to campus about twice a year for alumni rugby games, and I made a few other trips to give talks to the Physics department, or just to visit. Driving back from a weekend visiting Kate’s family in New Hampshire, I took the Mohawk Trail, just so I could swing through Williamstown along the way.

And it’s not just that I’m crazy– as I said, there are a huge number of alumni writing in to the class notes. Even more amazingly, a large number of successful alumni move to Berkshire County, or maintain second homes there, to remain close to the college. At the annual reunion weekends, the town is absolutely choked with people coming back to visit the campus and see old classmates– to a degree that’s remarkable even among elite small liberal arts colleges.

Probably two-thirds of my college-logo clothing is Williams related (and this is not a small component of my wardrobe), to the point that one of my students asked me this summer if I have a shoe deal with them. This is partly a function of the Union bookstore not stocking very much that I want to buy, but also, Williams means a lot to me. My time there is what convinced me that I wanted to teach at a small college, and my degree from there was a big part of getting me to where I could get the job I have now. When Williams alumni run into each other in other contexts, we almost invariably end up talking about Williams stuff (as Kate can certainly testify…).

As I said, it means a lot to me, and I still feel a very real connection to the college, even coming up on fifteen years since my graduation (yikes). But when we get the two different alumni publications, particularly the Class Notes, I do have to admit, it’s kind of like belonging to a cult…