i know all about the process. in painful detail. backstabbing! subterfuge! shady deals in dark alleyways! i exaggerate only slightly. how much detail would you want?

Yeah, I saw that too. I’d move the SJC logo up to the top (a bit like the Alumni website), but otherwise a very good redesign.

I’d love as much detail as you have the energy to provide; it’s hard to exhaust my interest in processes like this.

I’m not a big fan of this redesign, either. The menu bar is a bit wonky in Opera. But it is better than the last atrocity.

Wow, updating the St. John’s alumni page over the summer was one of my first web development jobs. They didn’t want me to touch anything, it was all to be fixed in the next round of development. I suppose there have probably been quite a few rounds since then. Looks pretty good, although even though I am the sort of person who inflicts this sort of thing on the world, I’m still not sure whether I like the special effects on the author names.

I have no particular insight into the process, so instead I’ll post my own reactions to it.

Good: the HTML is very semantic; it seems relatively clear where to find everything; the look is consistent with other college materials; the Flash is subtle and used to good effect.

Bad: the HTML doesn’t validate; the Flash doesn’t degrade gracefully; the design is weirdly cluttered while wasting a lot of space; there’s no clear logic to the organization of the top navigation bar; mouseover menus suck (but maybe that’s just me).

The validation thing particularly stings because the declared doctype is XHTML. Using XML is only an advantage if it’s properly written. HTML 4 (or 5!) is a perfectly good format for a web page, and it’s much more forgiving. If someone uses XHTML, I think they impose a special burden on themselves to get it right.

Speaking of web design, is the posting error message here yours? It’s really smart, in any case: it just kept me from an embarrassing double post.

Chair! CHAIR! CHAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIRRRRR!!

Brains!

Just thought I’d weigh in here since I am the leader of the web team that developed the new site. The site was designed by a firm out of Baltimore, Maryland called No | Inc. and was built by the web team comprised of people on both campuses. The final design is a result of many conversations by staff on both campuses and actually the process went pretty smoothly. The logo was specifically put center page to draw attention to the name of the college - just in case the user gets distracted by all of the flash elements. The site is, after all, an admissions vehicle and we want prospective students to be very clear about where they are. The interim site that you all speak so fondly of was never intended to be up for as long as it was (8 months!) but the development of the new version took longer than we hoped. I agree with you, it was ugly. Sorry about the chair hb, but most people were glad to see it go. Prospective students didn’t really understand the significance. If you are interested, there is a Facebook page devoted entirely to the chair. Nate, you probably don’t remember but I worked with you way back when you were the student aide in the PR office on campus. I hope this finds you well. Feel free to send me any feedback — webmaster@sjca.edu.

This is not a website question, but it is a question about St. John’s College. Are people concerned with the good press and the increased enrollment at the College? I spoke to a rising senior yesterday and he said that the freshman class was 160 last year.

I think people are concerned, including several tutors I have spoken with, and I certainly am. But then, I think 480 was too large and ideally we should be down at 300 from the perspective simply of educational excellence. The college has gotten large and kind of fat in some respects, though, which makes it extremely difficult to lose many students from that number if we want to keep paying the many staff members the school now has and to keep the grounds in halfway decent shape. (For the record, I can see the argument that would sacrifice both of those line items for the sake of a smaller polity.)

What I’ve heard about the more recent situation comes in part from someone who works in the admissions office. This person said that at one point recently the enrollment was above 500, which he said served as something of a wake-up call. Thus, he said, there is a plan in place to reduce the number of students downwards, but I don’t recall the specific target. The number of 160 is, of course, larger than we remember because Annapolis has eliminated Febbies, and so those twenty extra students must be admitted in the fall. Must be, we say, because of course we need those extra twenty tuition spots. Or wait, they’re not extra, because their funds are already budgeted. And so on. I don’t know what Mr. Nelson or the new treasurer think or plan on doing about the situation, but when I first heard about it I felt rather upset, given the number of times I’d heard Messrs. Nelson and Billups promise that building the new dorms wouldn’t result in an increased number of students. I’m satisfied that it was an accident or oversight that led to pushing 500 (the admissions person claimed the old story that an increased number of students had accepted admission offers), but it’s still a damaging error and one that requires care to rectify and to avoid in the future.

A friend of mine, initials ART, pegs the root problem as being that we’ve hired all these professionals to do the various jobs that tutors used to do. Does the school need that many advancement folks, he wonders? I wasn’t around when the school was less financially sound, but it’s at least a possibility that it was better off when cash-strapped. We’d really have to ask folks who were around then to know the difference the school’s relative wealth has made on the polity. In any case, the only practical course is going to involve great circumspection about spending any more money, and a greater rejection rate than the school is used to.

I was a work-study student in the Advancement Office for two years (in Santa Fe), and the place constantly seemed woefully, painfully under-staffed, with underpaid people routinely doing what could have been two or three people’s jobs.

The story that I was told is that the role of Advancement at the College was relatively new, or at least massively expanded, because a grant writer some years ago, noting that we had strangely low rates of alumni giving (the percentage of alumni who give, even in nominal amounts, is a simple measure of satisfaction, an indicator of institutional success, and thus encourages grants — which is why seniors are so strongly courted and encouraged to give even a few bucks a year), was shocked to be told that the College had never asked them to give anything. Reasoning, then, that the rate was, under the circumstances, startlingly high, the whole operation was somewhat fumblingly built from the ground up.

My belief in the goodness of the College and its peculiar pedagogy is such that I think good press and increased enrollment are very positive things, and that if they are sustained they are indicators that the time is soon to prune some shoots from both campuses for grafting onto a third.

Thank you, gentlemen, for the thoughts. I have difficulty thinking on this subject because I do not know what I truly expect the College, or any college, to do for its students. Of course, I can gesture in certain directions and encourage certain themes of learned knowledge, gained wisdom, and an increased respect for a polity - but such notions are not helpful when asking practical questions. My own choice to attend the College was based in a desire to become a renaissance man. This didn’t occur but many other marvelous points of growth did occur. While this occurred though, I think the College was in the role more of a midwife than a professor. Surprise, surprise. I do not know how this happened and therefore I do not know whether minor increases to enrollment would stifle the experience for subsequent students.

Moss: I can’t take credit for that: it’s a feature of Movable Type.

Hb: FYI, you’d like Montana internet cafes. I haven’t found one that doesn’t have its computers running on linux.

Regarding the size issue: I, like Martin, have a rather difficult time caring too much about the number of enrolled students. My sense of exactly how St. John’s accomplished its good in my time there and whether it could do things better or worse because of changes as seemingly arbitrary as a larger or smaller student body is exceedingly vague. That said, I’m not closed to the possibility that wiser souls may have important reasons to be concerned: I just want to confess to my initial suspicion that people really have good cause for concern.

But, then, it may be argued with significant legitimacy that I was doing so many things to hamstring the ability of the college experience to benefit me that I’m one of the least qualified former students to comment on this (or, perhaps, any) campus issue.

Yeah, I’m digging Ubuntu. I feel so free of stupid bullshit using it. I don’t really care that much about free and open source software as a principle, although the fact that I feel liberated is in some respect an endorsement of the former. I really like, however, getting superior software that I don’t have to pay for.

I’d be very curious to see examples of what you folks think are exemplary college websites, because I’ll soon be in the market for one. I look at the St. John’s website and its various recent torturous iterations and think, well, at least Shimer’s not the only place with a site problem. Except, well, Shimer lacks the means to go through redesigns at the same rate. It’s unbelievably expensive and energy-sucking to go through the process. Sometimes, my reaction to thinking about what it’s going to play out like plays out as puttering around on the Deep Springs site and reflect on simpler days. Incidentally, an organization called NRCCUA hires a bunch of high schoolers to evaluate college websites along what it has determined are the most important criteria for what a college site should do, and I think their findings are listed pretty accessibly on their own site. You all might be interested to see what their thoughts on such things are.

Word from Annapolis admission around April was that their admit-to-deposit yield took an unexpected dip this year; they didn’t admit the number of people they predicted would be necessary in order to fill the class they wanted. There just aren’t enough Great Books colleges or numbers within them to predict whether this might mean the popularity boom among prospective students might be starting to recede. Shimer’s the most similar case to St. John’s there is, but its recruitment situation is so different that there’s no point trying to make comparisons. But… if you’re worried it’s getting too big…

I never realized the impact of size until I started working for a school with a fifth of the population of a St. John’s campus. It changes everything, in ways good, bad, and neutral. I think the effect is just to make things… different. I think 500 would be pushing it, though. So would 50, but some pretty amazing things happen with around 70.

… and…. I worked in the Annapolis Development Office for 4 years, and I know that the people there may not all understand the college on the level that the undergrad alums do, but they develop an understanding and love of the place that by virtue of being outside bridges the language gap I’m pretty sure faculty would have were they the ambassadors to the outside world of donors. Shimer IS in the situation St. John’s was in before it financially got on its feet. We’ve been through three directors of development in the two-and-change years I’ve been here, and are currently looking for four because the third, a faculty member of a more pragmatic stripe than most, realized we needed an experienced administrator in order to get the job done well. Shimer recently—as in, really even when I first arrived and started the breaking of the mold—had virtually all administrative assignments covered part-time by faculty or even by committees largely comprised of students. It didn’t work. There’s too much work and it needs continuity, statistics, and focus. Transparency is important, advisory committees that involve students and faculty are, and hiring with student input is—it’s been a very painful process for the Shimer polity to move toward having more administrators, because at such a juncture no amount of transparency LOOKS transparent to those who are handing you work they’re sure they care more about, but these things have helped a lot. And so have the administrators. We just ended a year with a modest budget surplus, and have three times as many deposited incoming students as we did this time last year.

One interesting thing that Shimer does: the admission committee, which reads and decides on all completed applications, consists of two students and two faculty members elected democratically by the entire faculty, staff, and student body. That actually works out surprisingly well. I’m not sure how it could work in a larger community, though; in the context of Shimer, everyone who runs for the committee is someone everyone voting knows personally. This cuts down on politicking.

Strange facts: Chris Nelson is now the chair of our board, and in addition to me, there’s an alum from each campus of St. John’s at Shimer, both on the faculty. There’s also a Shimer alum teaching in Annapolis. Incestuous, isn’t it? Also, we have at least two transfers from St. John’s at the present.

to those who came before: how big were your freshman classes, on average? we were running 20-23 per seminar, and 18-20 per tutorial when we started. attrition cut those numbers a bit, for some, but honestly, my second-semester seminar just physically didn’t have enough room for everyone to sit at the table. sometimes we ran out of chairs and had to scavenge from tutor offices. my entering class was over 140, and i think it was much too big. i’m also left questioning their recruitment practices, after interacting with students in my classes and in others. i’m sure they’re more financially stable now, but i think the quality of the education provided has paid the price for that. i’m very happy to hear that admissions in annapolis didn’t “fill” their class for this year. what’s considered a “full” class is overfull, in my opinion. i wish my own year hadn’t been stuffed quite so full.

will write more about both website and take on admissions after neighbour stops using insanely loud power tools, gah.

Good grief. Classes were not that big for the Annapolis class of 2003, at least. 15 was about as big as a tutorial got (I remember hearing 13-15 was the norm as a prospect) and 18-20 was seminar-sized.

Anne, some of my classes in Santa Fe as a senior were the biggest I ever had at SJC (14-15 in a couple tutorials, and 21 in my seminar), and it’s very troubling to me that it’s gotten worse. It was okay, but everyone knew that if our seminar was any bigger it would be trouble. I think 15 and 20 are workable upper limits, if less than ideal. Eighteen or twenty people in a tutorial is just ridiculous, and it isn’t at all the same experience when you get into that range. It’s unacceptable.

Victoria,

Sorry to have missed your comment for so long! I’m not sure why it ran afoul of my spam filters. Thanks for the details on the web page redesign! It’s great to get some of the details behind the process. It’s also interesting to hear about why the chair design was so unpopular. HB’s always hated it, but I never really understood: it seemed like a good visual trope to me.

I do remember working with you, actually! As I recall, you were just beginning to learn HTML back then, and I had the pleasure of assisting you on a few occasions. I’m glad to hear you’ve since had a storied career taking the website out of the basement!