The Lake and Campus Life

"Lake? What Lake?"

There is a story that works its way around Hobart and William Smith. It’s like urban legend. No one can provide exact dates. The names and other details keep changing. You start to suspect that it never really happened. But the story gets told. Anyone who inhabits the Colleges will hear it eventually:

Two students are walking across campus. Usually they are first-years, and it’s early in the Fall Term. A faculty member is following within earshot, and hears one of the students say something about the lake — maybe: "I hear Joe’s living in a house over by the lake."

"Lake?" responds the other student. "What lake?"

Telling this story delights anyone who knows that the Colleges have had an uneasy and uncertain connection to Seneca Lake. The mere thought that a denizen of this place might be oblivious to the lake’s existence seems emblematic of something.

Lakes — especially lakes as remarkable as Seneca — draw attention to themselves. But by all accounts the Colleges somehow managed, during much of their history, to avoid Seneca Lake. The cited reasons are many. There is topography: a steep incline, leading to a rocky, forbidding shore. A railroad bed that rims its western edge like a DMZ. There are history and mystique: oft-told tales of drownings and other calamities, and resulting administration nightmares about loss and liability. Seneca Lake is deeper, and colder, and grayer than most. It scares you without so much as a boo.

At Reunion this year, we sought out alums and asked them about their lives, as students, on Seneca Lake. "We really never went there," most said. "We didn’t do that much with the lake."

Try telling that to Tina Savarese or Damien Herrick, geoscience majors who graduated in May and whose undergraduate careers placed them on or near the lake for innumerable hours. Or Ellen Lauterback ‘98, who just spent her summer studying erosion patterns in the Seneca Lake watershed.

Try telling geoscience faculty members Don Woodrow, Bill Ahrnsbrak, or John Halfman, or chemistry’s David Craig, whose curricula push students toward Seneca.

Or any member of the sailing or crew teams. Or the student artist who specialized in impressionistic lakescapes. Or, for that matter, any current student who has (outside official Colleges sanction) dipped a toe at that not-too-secret spot a few feet south of the Colleges’ dock.

It’s true that when you go looking for official interaction between the Colleges and Seneca Lake, prior to 1970, there is almost none. But look in other areas or, especially, in more-recent times, and it washes up everywhere.

One way in which virtually every member of the Colleges community is touched by Seneca Lake is as a focal point for lives of the mind. It’s all about those benches, installed along South Main early this decade and now beckoning faculty, staff, students, and visitors alike to take a moment alongside the depth and permanence represented by Seneca.

As a student, John Norvell ‘66 (now Hobart’s director of alumni relations), "didn’t pay much attention to the lake." It was only sporadically viewable from campus. In the 1980s, though, then-President Carroll Brewster authorized construction of the Colleges’ dock. Laura Sweeney Brophy ‘86, director of alumnae relations, remembers this having a beacon-like effect. She relates a particularly important afternoon she and friends spent relaxing on the west shore. "My guess is that every alum has a fond memory of an afternoon like that," she says.

In the ‘90s, President Richard Hersh continued the trend: the benches along South Main, and facing the lake, went in. This was something of a masterstroke. "Dick Hersh has made an appreciable difference in connection to the lake," says Provost Sheila Bennett. "When I came here [in 1990] it was a boundary."

Bennett is behind plans to increasingly instill the orientation process each fall with a sense of place, so that incoming students appreciate the region and city they now inhabit. Many of the orientation seminars given by faculty members pertain to the lake, including one on the Colleges’ lab boat.

How early does the lake connection now crop up in the HWS experience? Try the tour given to prospective students.

"They come out of the admissions office, they walk down South Main, andthey see the lake," says Mara O’Laughlin, director of admissions. "It is a powerful front yard. No other college has a front yard like ours."

Both of the Colleges’ admissions offices overlook Seneca Lake — a result of happenstance originally, but now a crucial piece of the admissions process. "Link the lake" is a prerogative given the admissions staff. That’s especially easy with future environmental science majors, and future rowers and sailors, but Admissions applies it to everyone.

"While they are standing here, looking out, we tell them, ‘When you are a student here, over four years, it would be incredible if you didn’t sit on these benches and look at the lake,’" O’Laughlin continues. "Really, though, you don’t have to say much to them at all." — D.C.

The Seneca Lake series was researched and written by Dana Cooke and Peter Rolph '85 — writer/editors in the Office of College Relations. Portions of the series also appear in the Fall '97 issue of The Pulteney St. Survey. To request a copy, e-mail Susan Murad at murad@hws.edu.