Prepping the Osher William and Mary Campus Tour
Are you new to the area? Have you lived here for a while but never explored the campus that is at the center of our town? As an Osher member, you are part of the academic community of William & Mary. Here's your chance to stroll along the shaded pathways, through gardens and woods, and past the Colonial-era buildings of the Old Campus while learning about the university’s history, architecture, legends, and lore. Tours will be conducted by W&M graduates, former professors, and/or longtime residents who are now also members of the Osher Institute at William & Mary. The tour will be held rain or shine, and requires being comfortable walking 1-2 miles outdoors as well as negotiating the occasional staircase or uneven terrain.
This is the course description for a new class that the Osher Program will offer in the Spring: a tour of William and Mary’s Old Campus. The Osher Curriculum Committee has been talking about offering this for at least the last six months, and it’s now firmly rooted in the course catalog for the Spring of 2023. I’m really excited about this.
The tour will be led by people who know and love this campus – alumni, active or retired professors, and longtime residents of the town who have grown to appreciate this institution that is at the heart of our community. This afternoon, I’m meeting with some of the Osher program staff to walk this tour and talk about what we want to emphasize. I’m always happy to show off my campus to people who don’t know it well, so I’m looking forward to this afternoon.
Our plan is to offer a different tour – this one of the New Campus (developed since the 1970s) – in the fall of 2023. In future semesters, we will offer these tours again, and will probably branch out to offer custom tours of the campus – tours focused on the athletic facilities or on the arts facilities.
We know that many retirees who move to Williamsburg are attracted by the college. College towns offer a lot in the way of cultural and community events that are not found in similarly-sized communities without a college at its hub.
William and Mary's students make up a substantial portion of the population of the local area. The City of Williamsburg has a little over 15,000 residents. Surrounding James City County has about 76,000 residents, and nearby York County has 68,000 residents. The college has 8,000 students and several thousand employees (it’s remarkably difficult to get an accurate count of the college staff). This is a significant consumer base for local businesses. When COVID caused the college to pause in-person instruction, many students worked from home (home-home, as students refer to where their parents live) and didn’t patronize local businesses, with the logical result that many businesses closed down.
Like many college towns, Williamsburg deals with some town-gown issues. Students are noisier than us older folks, and they tend to walk across streets without looking to see if any cars are coming. They sometimes drink too much and behave badly in public. They sometimes look down on “townies” as being somehow “lesser.” If Mom and Dad are paying for their college expenses, they tend to bid up the price of housing near the campus, with the consequence that affordable housing is scarce in the locations where hourly wage workers would like to live in order to take jobs in the restaurant or commercial sector where students (and their visiting families) spend their money.
The goal of the Osher Campus Tour offerings is to break down some of this town-gown distance and instead build relationships. If Osher members become comfortable with enjoying the sights and sounds of this vibrant campus, maybe they’ll engage with other parts of campus life. Everyone will benefit from this.
Nice!