“I was unbelievably impressed by not so much the Williams-in-India program but by the idea, as I remember Gaudino explaining it to me, this is well after I graduated, that people in the William-in-India program as they were sitting around talking about their experience in India it dawned on them that they knew a whole lot more about village India than they knew about village U.S. Then that resulted in the Williams in America program in which people went to, you know, live with small shopkeepers, auto workers and so on, right? And since I’m a kind of anthropologist as a political scientist, I thought it was a brilliant move and just the kind of thing Williams needed. You know William Sloan Coffin a long time ago said that the solution to Williams’ problems would be to move half of CCNY to Williams and half of Williams to CCNY.

–Jim Scott '58,
Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University and a leading expert on the poorest groups in underdeveloped nations