Harry Payne, Former Williams President, Dies

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Harry C. Payne
WILLIAMSTOWN - Harry C. Payne, 60, former Williams College president, jumped to his death Monday afternoon from the eighth floor of an Atlanta hotel.

According to reports in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Woodward Academy president had given an upbeat speech just hours before to staff and faculty at the College Park, Ga., school to kick of the 2008 semester.

A suicide note was found in his eighth-floor room in the midtown hotel but police declined to reveal its contents. The Fulton County Medical Examiner's Office ruled the death a suicide, according to the Journal-Constitution.

Payne was the 14th president of Williams, serving from 1994 to 1999. The great room in Goodrich Hall was renamed for him; the Harry C. Payne Williams College Professorship in the Liberal Arts is designed to promote and support interdisciplinary teaching and research.

He was instrumental in the construction and renovation of the college's $45 million Science Center and updating of Griffin Hall, the college's oldest classroom building. He also helped launch planning for the '62 Center for Theatre and Dance.

"We benefit here at Williams every day from initiatives carried out or begun during the presidency of this wonderfully decent and caring man who dedicated his professional career to expanding the intellectual lives of students," posted Williams President Morton O. Schapiro on the college's Web site Tuesday. "His influence lingers even in the construction of our North and South Academic Buildings, designed to achieve for the humanities and social sciences what, under his stewardship, the Science Center was able to do for the natural sciences."

Payne earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degree from Yale University. He was president of Hamilton College in New York prior to Williams. He resigned from Williams to lead the 108-year-old Woodward. Reportedly the largest independent school in the nation with an enrollment of 2,850, the school was established as the Georgia Military Academy and serves Grades prekindergarten through 12 in five schools in the College Park area.


According to news reports, Payne had been successful in leading Woodward through a multimillion-dollar capital campaign and taught a history class in the Upper School.

Ben Johnson, a close friend and the school's chairman of the board, said told the Journal-Constitution on Tuesday that "I've never seen him more upbeat."

"It is as close to totally inexplicable as anything I've ever dealt with," he said.

Payne leaves a wife, Deborah, and two grown sons, Jonathan and Sam, and brother, Richard, of Andover. The funeral was scheduled for today at 3 at Arlington Cemetery in Atlanta.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution Obituary
Schapiro's Post
Payne's Legacy
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Mount Greylock School Committee Sets 2026-27 Agenda

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock School Committee last month laid out its priorities for the next year while acknowledging three members of the seven-person panel may be gone by November.
 
In a special in-person meeting at the middle-high school on a Saturday morning in August, the School Committee finalized its goals for the academic year ahead.
 
The four-hour meeting was attended by six of the committee's seven members, including three who face challengers in the Nov. 3 election.
 
The committee ended up agreeing on five goals to set for 2026-27: setting regular meetings and getting regular reports from its Outcomes Subcommittee; improving community outreach by the full committee; implementing a committee member orientation plan for the at least one new member who will be elected in the fall; advancing a district-wide "visions and values" process; and aligning the committee's practice with state requirements for a student representative.
 
Before the group got into goal-setting, it reviewed the results of a self-evaluation process it undertook for the previous academic year.
 
Members noted that in 38 areas outlined by the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, the seven Mount Greylock members rated its own performance as below satisfactory in just seven. And it was those areas that are addressed in the goals for 2026-27. 
 
The MASC has five different subcategories headed "community engagement," and the MGRSC members rated themselves between 2.9 and 3.3 on a scale of 1 to 4 in three of the five. The lowest score in the self-evaluation was for the topic of "Community Engagement - Building Support" with an aggregate score of 2.86 and two of the seven members giving the panel a score of 2 in the wake of a budget season when one of the district's two towns chose to amend the district's budget on the floor of its town meeting.
 
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