James Gregory Kolesar

FAVORITE MEMORIES OF WILLIAMS

Too numerous and greatly outnumbered by 36 years as an administrator

WILLIAMS CLUBS / ACTIVITIES

Crew team, Faculty/Student Committee on Athletics

CURRENT INTERESTS, PASSIONS, AND ORGANIZATIONS

Numerous

LIFE SINCE GRADUATION

I’ve been living in a Norman Rockwell painting.

I walked to work . . . walk to church . . . walk to the annual town meeting. Our kids walked to elementary school. When buying our house, I could walk to what was then our home, to the realtor, to the bank, and to the lawyer’s office all in my lunch hour.

Since that purchase, we’ve lived on a street of seven houses that ends in small woods along the Green River. And if all that isn’t clichéd enough for you, there was for many years a tree branch with a tire swing from which you could splash into the water.

Like those Saturday Evening Post covers, this image doesn’t convey the whole, more complicated, picture, but small-town life has certainly suited me, at least life in this particular small town.

We moved here from the center of London in 1984, when I was offered the chance to switch from being a radio journalist to serving as the college’s public-affairs officer. It was an even bigger leap for my Scottish wife, who was emigrating.

From the get-go, however, this felt like home.

Try not to feel old when you read this next sentence. I’ve worked with seven Williams presidents, more than one-third of the 18 in its history. And those are just the ones who are officially numbered— there were also two interims.

What was the job? I’d wince when anyone asked me because it was so hard to describe. I even had one person say, “For someone who’s a professional communicator, you sure can’t communicate what you do.” The way I framed it in my own mind was that I tried to help the college be as articulate as possible about itself. Explicating that idea would take more space than available here.

It was certainly a liberal artsy job. I might work with a chemist in the morning and a religion professor in the afternoon. Students, forever 21, kept us on our toes, mostly in good ways, but not always.

Certainly not every day was stress-free. Colleges only seem removed from the world. In fact, almost all of its issues affect campuses, sometimes even before they’re more widely felt. Think about South Africa, race relations, class issues, LGBTQ matters, sexual assault, the nature of political discourse.

After 31 years, I felt that other, younger, people should be doing this work, especially in the age of social media, which I had no interest in mastering. For five more years I worked part-time with Adam Falk and then Maud Mandel on just community and government affairs.

This was a great community in which to raise a family. We could tell our kids that if they ever did anything stupid, we’d probably learn about it in five minutes, which turned out to be only partly true. Two of the four actually ended up going to Williams, if you call that going. Like many of your families, they’re now scattered. There’s one each in Michigan, Boston’s North Shore, and Africa, and one, against all odds here in Williamstown, who, from an office 20 feet from where mine was, serves the college as assistant counsel. She and her husband (both ’06) brought with them two of our now three grandchildren. We were a Covid pod.

This has also been a congenial place for my wife, Alison, to pursue her work as an artist and illustrator.

Williamstown having been turned by property values into an invisibly gated community, I now spend my volunteer time walking off the edge of the Rockwell canvas and into the more variegated communities of North Adams and Pittsfield.