“I mean, it was an experiment. It was the first — he chose topics to study that he sort of felt would be important. He chose the political scientist’s point of view. He wanted to study the courts. He wanted to study the schools. He wanted to study [police and health care]. Yes and what we would get out of it would be, you know, “How does race influence that?”

I think almost every one of us, in coming back to Williams after Williams-at-Home we were much more engaged in the classroom. We found more relevance to what we were doing. I certainly felt a greater sense of energy. For some reason I don’t think that it mattered as much why we went, it’s what we learned while we were on the program and then the aftereffects of it. It wasn’t just personal growth, I think. There are things that we were exposed to, experiences, points of view of other people that still haven’t been replicated in my life, in the last 35 years. People don’t go and try to experience what it’s like to be working in a subsistence logging or farming existence, you know, a hollow in Kentucky or a mountain in Tennessee. So I’ve never met anybody outside this program who actually spent a lot of time on a pig farm in Iowa and working in a factory in Detroit. It’s an ongoing process of trying to reflect and appreciate that, but there’s no question in my mind that my own worldview is more tolerant, more pluralistic, more appreciative.

In retrospect, I guess that a course afterwards and certainly long debriefing section would’ve been great. But at the time, because I felt that it was a period of intensely personal set of experiences I’d been through that were mine, in that group, I was content to sort of be with that and reflect on that.

–Jon Kravetz '74