My William and Mary Tour – Stop 6, James Blair Hall
First, to clarify – this building was called Marshall-Wythe Hall when I was a student at the college. The college website says that the building’s name was changed to James Blair Hall in 1968, but if it was, we never acknowledged it. Built as a Public Works Administration project in 1934-35, it was intended to house the Marshall-Wythe School of Government and Citizenship. When it opened in 1936, the second and third floors were occupied by the departments of Economics, Government, History, Sociology, and the School of Jurisprudence (Law School). The Economics and Government departments were still in this building when I was in school. It currently houses the departments of History and Philosophy.
If you look up Marshall-Wythe Building on the college website today, it will take you to the Marshall-Wythe School of law several blocks away on South Henry Street in Williamsburg. If you remember reading about Tucker Hall on June 17, you’ll recall that after the library moved to its building on the new campus in the 1965-66 school year, the law school moved from the Marshall-Wythe Building into the old library building. The old library was renamed Marshall-Wythe Hall when the law school moved in, and the old Marshall-Wythe Hall became James Blair Hall. Got it?
I had all of my Economics and Government classes in this building. As an economics major, that meant 33 credit hours of economics – 11 classes. I also took 12 hours of government – 4 classes – most of them in this building. I spent a lot of time here.
I don’t have any pictures of the classrooms in this building. hey were nothing special – rows of wooden desks with permanent writing arms, blackboards in the front, giant windows along the sides.
As I mentioned, I had a lot of classes in this building, so I have lots of memories. I’m just going to tell you about a few of them
I took my first economics class in the fall of my freshman year from Anthony Sancetta (we called him Dirty Tony because he seemed to like the female students). I got an “F” on my first economics test – I didn’t really understand supply and demand – and promised myself I would figure this all out. Despite this rocky start, I ended the semester with a B and went on to major in economics. Take that, Tony!
During my sophomore year I took Microeconomics from Mr. Choi, who spoke with a heavy Chinese accent which didn’t help me understand this complex topic. I remember him coming into the classroom every session, barely acknowledging the students in the classroom, drawing an X and Y axis on the board, and then proceeding to fill them in with various economic functions while we all furiously took notes and tried to make sense of all of this. I got a C in this course and was happy to escape alive.
I also took economic statistics in this building during my sophomore year. We used a calculator lab room to solve our homework problems. The analog calculators looked something like this and made ka-chunk ka-chunk ka-chunk noises as they solved the problems. You could make it ka-chunk forever if you asked it to divide some number by zero. Fun times. I also got a C in this class – mainly because I didn’t realize until the day of the final exam that we were permitted to bring a sheet of formulas with us into the exam, and I didn’t prepare one.
If you’re paying attention, you’ll note that I received two C’s in my major field during my sophomore year. That should have scared me away, but it didn’t. I was either too brave or too stupid to decide I should major in something else, so I stuck with it.
My advisor was Leonard Schifrin, who taught economics at the college from 1965 until his retirement in 1998 and was the department chairman for a lot of those years. I took antitrust economics from him during my junior year, and I think I began to hit my stride (about time). I got A’s both semesters in this class.Mr. Schifrin (we called all of our professors “Mr.” in those days, no matter what degree they held. I don’t know why.) had worked on developing the Medicare program during the Johnson years, and he had a lot to say about the economics of health care policy. He taught classes on the public policy implications of health care at various medical schools throughout his career. I have a lot of memories of Mr. Schifrin, but one that sticks in my mind is his discussion of the need for government support of things like health care, and, when he was questioned about it, he claimed, “well, now I have donned my socialist cloak.”
I spoke with Mr. Schifrin several times over the years since graduation, both before and after we moved to Williamsburg, At the college homecoming in 1993, I tracked him down in his office and we chatted for a while. He claimed to remember me, but I think he was just being kind. I wasn’t that memorable. I remember talking to him about our son Kevin who was in the process of thinking about college. I knew Mr. Schifrin had taught at Yale before coming to William and Mary, so I asked him what the value of a Yale education would be over a William and Mary education (Kevin was interested in Yale). Mr. Schifrin told me he thought the primary advantage was that a degree from Yale would open the next door for Kevin. Beyond that, he said it was Kevin’s performance, not his alma mater, that mattered. I thought that was wise.
During this same visit, I asked him what he thought about President Clinton’s 1993 health care plan – the one that didn’t go anywhere but would re-emerge as Obamacare two decades later. He was dismissive of it, mainly because Bill had put Hillary in charge of it. He didn’t think Hillary was stupid – she was a Yalie, after all – but he thought it was an insult to all of the professionals who had been immersed in the politics of healthcare for decades (like him) to put someone smart but inexperienced in this position. He said that’s when he knew Bill wasn’t really serious about healthcare reform. This was an interesting perspective from the point of view of someone who had been involved in this field since the 1960s.
Mr. Schifrin passed away in Williamsburg in February of 2021 at the age of 88. I occasionally saw him and his wife around campus and in Osher classes.
I also took some government classes in this building. Since this was not my major, I had greater latitude in what I took. My favorite courses by far were two semesters of Comparative Government, taught by Margaret Hamilton. Miss Hamilton (she was the one professor we did not call “Mister”) was the Chair of the Department of Government from 1973-1978 and she also acted in that capacity in 1968-1969, the year after I took classes from her. I haven’t been able to find a picture of her; she doesn’t appear in any of the four yearbooks I have, and there don’t seem to be any pictures of her online. When you google her, you come up with lots of pictures of the actress Margaret Hamilton who played the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz. Not the same person.
She retired from the college in 1986 and died in 1993. As I read about her for this essay, I regretted not getting to know her better. She was a pioneer in women’s education, so far as I can tell, graduating from the University of Michigan and Columbia before teaching at the college from 1953 until 1969. She received many honors – a Fulbright Fellowship for a year’s study at the University of Paris and a Ford Foundation Fellowship, in addition to serving as an adviser to the Council of World Affairs in San Francisco.
I have very specific and fond memories of her classes in Comparative Government. When I began graduate school in political science six years later, my primary field of concentration was Comparative Government. It still fascinates me. I’m sorry I never went back to tell Miss Hamilton that. I think she would have been pleased.
One more thing about this building – during my sophomore year I worked one semester for one of the economics professors in the department office on the second floor, although I don’t remember which one. My job was generally clerical – I typed, made copies, and answered phones. I remember one of my jobs was to skim through publishers’ announcements of newly published books in the field of political science and fill out purchase order forms so that the books could be purchased for the college library. I have no idea how the process worked after that – I assume someone culled these forms so that the library wasn’t ordering books on my say-so, but I don’t know.
See you next Friday for Week 7 of my campus tour – Earl Gregg Swem Memorial Library.
That's why I've always preferred the political side of economics. Math econ is just too scary.