Touring the WM Campus

This afternoon Tim and I will be doing a final walk-through of the Osher “WM Campus Tour,” which will kick off on Thursday.  The director of the Osher program will be with us as we finalize our tour plans.

We started talking about offering this as an Osher class last summer.  After a lot of discussion and planning, we were able to include this offering in our course catalog for this semester:

Are you new to the area? Lived here for a while but never explored the campus? As an Osher member, you are part of the academic community of William & Mary. Here’s your chance to stroll shaded pathways, through gardens and woods, and past the Colonial-era buildings of the Old Campus while learning about the university’s history, architecture, and lore.

Tours will be led by W&M alumni, former professors, and/or longtime residents who are also members of the Osher Institute. The tour will be held rain or shine and requires being comfortable walking 1-2 miles outdoors and negotiating the occasional staircase or uneven terrain.

It didn’t take too long for this class to fill – and we have a waitlist.  It’s gratifying when Osher members respond this enthusiastically to a new course offering.

Tim and I contacted local William and Mary alumni that we knew to find out if they were interested in helping out with this.  Apparently everyone except us is traveling during April – they all turned us down because they were going to be out of town.  But they were willing to be on the list of potential tour guides in the upcoming semesters, so that’s good.  The result is that Tim and I will be leading the tour for all three sessions.  In preparation, we’ve walked this area a couple of times (both separately and together) to make sure that we know what we want to say in each location.  Tough duty.

Parking is difficult around campus.  Osher members can purchase fairly inexpensive parking passes that allow us to park in a few lots on the campus periphery, but none of these are very close to where we’ll start the tour.  So we are offering course members two options: they can gather at the Osher office in New Town (a mile or so off campus) and ride a shuttle that we’ve arranged to get them to the right location, or they can park on their own in a couple of commercial areas near Merchant Square or the public library and walk a few blocks to the starting point for the tour.

During the two-hour tour, we’ll be visiting locations on the Old Campus – the historic 18^th-century buildings as well as the dorms and classroom buildings built between 1900 and the 1940s. 

The tour will start at the blue dot across Jamestown Road from the college Admissions Office – the blue building #2  We’ll walk to the area furthest to the right on this map, through the Wren Building (red, #155), and then around the Sunken Garden, stopping at various places to talk about the buildings, statues, and natural features of the area.  We’ll visit Crim Dell and the surrounding pathways and then make our way back to the Wren Building.

Our goal is to make the campus feel accessible to Osher members.  As the course description notes, the College of William and Mary is the intellectual and cultural hub of our community.  Many retirees choose to relocate here because they want to live in a college town.  But if they don’t already know the campus, they are reluctant to wander in and start barging around.  After this tour, they will realize that this a great place to walk your dog (or yourself), have a picnic, bring visitors, watch a pick-up softball, soccer, football, lacrosse, frisbee, golf, or Quidditch game in the Sunken Garden, or just sit on a bench and people-watch.

A random afternoon in ”Sunky G” (as the students apparently call it these days)

In subsequent semesters, we’ll offer variations on this tour.  Next fall we’ll tour the “New Campus,” and in the following semesters we may offer a “tree tour,” an “Art & Architecture” tour, or a tour of the college athletic facilities.  We are limited only by our imagination and the interests of our members.