About the Fund

What We Do

The work of the Fund, through the Board of Trustees and the Gaudino Scholars, is to:

  1. Foster academic and pedagogical innovations within the curriculum, particularly those which require greater responsibility on the part of the students and in which there is, to use a description of Gaudino’s, a “mixing of two purposes: the defining of subject matter and the penetration of premises and observations or participants;”
  2. Encourage dialogue and critical reflection on curricular and extracurricular topics;
  3. Support learning through the experience of confrontation with the self and others in and out of the classroom, on and off campus, promoting affective with intellectual change; and
  4. Stimulate debate about the liberal arts enterprise and the Williams experience itself, from curricular reform to the meaning of citizenship.

The entirety of our mission statement can be found here.

Who We Are

The Gaudino Fund board is composed of 12 alumni, up to five undergraduates, and the current Gaudino Scholar. Meetings take place in the Spring and Fall in Williamstown.

The alumni trustees serve a three year term, renewable for a second three year period. Alumni trustees are recruited because of their commitment to advancing education at Williams in the Gaudino tradition. The board is always looking for interested potential trustees and encourages anyone to be in touch about their interest.

The bylaws govern the board’s operations and relationship with the College. An endowment principally raised during the years immediately following Bob Gaudino’s death and during the College’s Third Century Campaign is overseen by the Trustees.  The complete text of the Memorandum of Understanding between the Board and Williams College can be found here.

History of the Fund

The history of the Gaudino Fund reflects, in many ways, the bond between professor and student that has always been at the center of a Williams education – in this case, the closeness established between one teacher and a devoted corps of his students, who felt his teaching had had a deep impact on their own lives.Shortly after Robert Gaudino’s untimely death at the age of 49 in 1974, a group of his former students contacted each other and set out to raise funds for an appropriate memorial in his name.

Raising the funds proved less difficult than finding an appropriate use for them. An intense and driven educator, Professor Gaudino had a highly individualistic way of teaching that crossed many traditional disciplinary boundaries and incorporated self-knowledge as a central goal of any course he taught. So establishing a traditional “chair” in his discipline, political science, seemed far short of the mark. Instead, the committee of fund-raisers sought a way in which Professor Gaudino’s broader educational philosophy and methods might continue to make an impact on the entire campus.

This was no small goal. Williams in the late 70’s and early 80’s was no stranger to curricular innovation, but a group of alumni had rarely, if ever, been the chief motivating force in designing a major educational initiative.

Members of the Board

  • Jason Ananda Josephson Storm (Gaudino Scholar)
  • Randy Thomas ’73 (Chair)
  • Michael Lucow ’74
  • Ken Kessel ’74
  • Bonnie Bennett ’75
  • Laura Winston ’75
  • Michael Rosenblum ’76
  • Navjeet Bal ’84
  • Noah Clark ’95
  • Lars Ojukwu ’08
  • Bryant Lewis ’09
  • Victoria Liu ’21
  • Edwin Carpio ’21 (Student Board Member)

Former Scholars