While many of us spent New Year’s Eve counting down, Kristin Kelliher ’16 was going up.

Way up.

Right now, Kelliher is leading a three-person team — two fellow ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ sophomores and her stepfather, Bill Bender — to the summit of Aconcagua, a 22,841-foot peak in western Argentina that’s the tallest in the Western Hemisphere.

Kristen Kelliher ’16 of Norwich, Vt., the youngest female to climb the highest peaks in all 50 U.S. states, is leading a hike up Aconcagua, the Western Hemisphere’s highest mountain. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

She’s climbing Aconcagua not just “because it’s there,” in the words of Everest climber George Mallory, but for a related reason: The mountain is not here, meaning in the U.S.

Kelliher has already climbed all the highest peaks in the U.S., becoming the youngest female to “highpoint” all 50 states in 2012 when she reached the top of Alaska’s Denali at age 18. She was also the youngest highpoint the lower 48 states, in 2011, receiving for both achievements.

Besides reaching even greater heights on this South America trek, the Aconcagua climb is the first that she’s leading. “My other big mountains, like Rainier, were guided,” she says.

She chose Aconcagua because she “wanted something not technically difficult” for her first major climb as a leader. At the same time she sought the challenge of “being able to plan, fund and do my own trip of substantial size with no guides.”

“We’ll take it really slow.”

The biggest obstacle on this climb, she says, “is altitude. It’s the highest I’ve been.”

During the fall, she and her ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ climbmates, Jordan Cargill ’16 of Freedom, N.H., Jonathan Gougelet ’16 of Hanover, N.H., trained for the climb by doing laps up and down Mount David (elevation 354 feet) while carrying 50-pound packs.

Kristen Kelliher ’16 is seen here while climbing Mount Rainier in late summer 2013.

“We’ll take it really slow, not just one push,” she says. “We’ll do acclimatization hikes, and we’ll ‘climb high, sleep low.'”

“Climb high, sleep low” is a strategy where a climber takes some gear to the next, higher camp, then hikes back down to sleep at the lower camp. The next morning, the climber hauls the tents and the rest of the gear to the higher camp, repeating the process all the way up the mountain.

This photograph from Kelliher’s 2012 climb of Denali shows the landscape at 17 Camp, so named for its 17,000-foot elevation. (Photo: Kristen Kelliher ’16)

Kelliher’s team departed ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ right after finals, on Dec. 15, traveling by plane from Boston to Miami, from there to Santiago, Chile, and then on to Mendoza, Argentina. They took the bus to Los Penitentes to meet a mule team that would haul their gear to the base camp, Plaza de Mulas, at around 14,000 feet.

They hope to hit the summit around Jan. 1, where they’ll unfurl a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ banner.

Kelliher describes mountain climbing “beautiful, hard and rewarding.”

“You’re not thinking. You’re just going.”

“When you’re on a rope team, 30 feet from the next person, it can be so reflective. All you hear is your ice ax, your crampons, and your own hard breathing. You’re not thinking. You’re just going. It is a very comfortable state to be in.

“Then you get to the top — or not — and you say, ‘That was cool, that was agreat experience.’

“Sometimes I hate it. I wonder why I do it. It’s painful, hard and emotionally and physically demanding. But something about it draws me.”

John Pappas, father of Troy ’16, leaves the College Chapel at the end of the Oct. 11 memorial service, followed by head football coach Mark Harriman. Pappas holds Troy’s jersey, signed by his teammates, and a floral arrangement from the service. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College.

Last week, as Troy Pappas ’16 lay hospitalized in critical condition following a fall in a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ residence hall, multifaith chaplains Bill Blaine-Wallace and Emily Wright-Magoon responded to a call for a moment of silence for the injured student.

It was lunchtime in Commons and the big dining hall was packed. The chaplains went partway up a stairway and started speaking, softly, about him.

“It was like waves of silence going out across the entire Commons,” Holly Gurney, associate dean of students, told a campus community gathered in the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Chapel on Oct. 11 to commemorate Pappas, who died Oct. 5. “I’ve never heard Commons silent, ever. I wasn’t really sure it was possible. But the sense of caring for the family and for Troy, and the sense of loss and hope, stopped everything.”

Troy Pappas ’16 wore this jersey, hanging from the pulpit during the memorial gathering, as a wide receiver for the football team. His teammates signed it during his stay in the hospital before he died. A thousand origami doves adorning the Chapel were folded by members of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ community in honor of Troy and in support of the Pappas family. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College.

“It’s an amazing tribute to him in a very, very ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ way.”

The 18-year-old Pappas, a football player and student of math and science, was injured Sept. 29. The chapel was filled for the gathering that honored Pappas’ life and shared the sorrow of his loss through music, prayer and reflections.

Troy’s family sat in front. Also in the front rows were his football teammates, dozens of big guys bent over in grief, temporarily not so tough.

A few candles in tall stands flickered and smoked along the center aisle. One thousand multicolored paper doves, folded by members of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ community over the last few days and hung on string, made a ragged curtain across the chancel.

Music by Bach and Mozart, played by organist John Corrie and sung by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Choir and members of the a cappella groups, bookended the service. Blaine-Wallace’s invocation offered thoughts by Marcel Proust about the inadequacy of formal condolences; while Wright-Magoon, in her benediction, quoted May Sarton’s poem “All Souls”:

What has been plaited cannot be unplaited —
only the strands grow richer with each loss.
And memory makes kings and queens
of us.

Pappas’ teammate Ryan Weston ’13 prayed for bravery and vision, and head football coach Mark Harriman led the gathering in “A Litany of Remembrance,” a tradition at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ memorial services. The Deansmen sang, pianist Brendan Davidson ’14 followed his creative imagination through an extended improvisation and Brett Emmons ’15 shared some consoling thoughts from the Bahá’i faith.

But it was Gurney who left the listeners with an enduring picture of Pappas. While she had not known him personally, she allowed, she had spent the days since Sept. 29 learning about him in countless conversations with those who had.

“There are a few things that I’ve heard again and again,” she said: what a great sense of humor he had, and how much fun he was to be with. How charming he could be, and how helpful.

The Deansmen offer “I Shall Not Walk Alone” by Ben Harper. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College.

“I discovered that he was very bright, very bright,” she said. “He used that intelligence to reach out to those around him, tutoring friends in different subjects where he had a strength.”

Gurney said, “He didn’t bother so much with the superficial stuff. I heard from people that what he wanted to know from them was the big questions — what do you want to do in life, what do you want out of life, what are we doing here?”

“That is an exceptional thing in a first-year student in his first semester.”

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College President Clayton Spencer tonight sent an email message to the campus community to share the news that first-year student Troy J. Pappas, 18, of Eliot, Maine, died this afternoon.

In accordance with Troy’s wishes, the family is pursuing the option to donate his organs.

In her message, Spencer wrote, “This news is heartbreaking for Troy’s family and for the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ community.â€�

Troy died at 4:10 p.m., Oct. 5, six days after a fall down a stairwell in Parker Hall on the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ campus the night of Saturday, Sept. 29. He had been in treatment at Central Maine Medical Center since very shortly after the incident, and his family was with him.

College staff have been providing emotional support and counseling for members of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ community throughout this difficult time, and will continue to do so in the coming days and weeks.

Troy Pappas, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Class of 2016

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College President Clayton Spencer wrote via email to the campus community the afternoon of Sunday, Sept. 30, regarding first-year student Troy J. Pappas, 18, of Eliot, Maine, who was seriously injured in a fall down a stairwell Saturday night in Parker Hall, a student residence on campus.

Troy is being treated at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston.

The incident took place around 9:30 p.m. Saturday. A ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ student who was with Troy at the time called the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Office of Security and Campus Safety.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ security officers together with ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Emergency Medical Services responded immediately, and Troy was transported by ambulance to Central Maine Medical Center.

Troy’s parents were notified and have been at the hospital since shortly after the incident, along with members of his extended family. Members of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ community have been with the family as well.

A first-year student from Eliot, Maine, Troy is a member of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ football team. His studies are focused on science and math. He is a graduate of Marshwood High School in South Berwick where he attained highest honors. There, he was a captain and quarterback of the football team, a member of the varsity baseball and basketball teams, and a member of the math team and student government.

In her email to the community, Spencer wrote, “I would like to express my deepest concern and support for Troy and his family, and I hope that you will join all of us in the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ community as we keep them in our thoughts and prayers.â€�

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ staff members have been providing counseling and emotional support to Troy’s friends and other students since the incident.

The college will update the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ community about any significant changes in Troy’s condition.

From left, Convocation speakers Umar Khan ’13, professor Stephen Engel and ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ President Clayton Spencer chat prior to Convocation 2012. Also shown are professors Sawyer Sylvester and Thomas Tracy. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College.

Telling the Class of 2016 that there is no higher reward than to work with passion and purpose, President Clayton Spencer offered as an example a mentor from her own past: the late U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy.

“He was meant to be a senator, and he was lucky enough to figure that out early and throw himself into a career that he approached each and every day with passion, diligence and joy, and with a lot of laughs — not all at my expense,” said Spencer, who worked for Kennedy as chief education counsel for the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources in the 1990s.

Read the full texts of Convocation remarks by President Clayton Spencer and Assistant Professor of Politics Stephen Engel.

Learn more about the Class of 2016.

Having moved into Lane Hall just two months ago, Spencer was among the newbies during Tuesday’s Convocation as she gave her first speech as president to the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ community. She addressed 503 first-year students and 17 transfers, along with hundreds of upperclassmen, staff and faculty in Alumni Gym. (For the second year in a row, the ceremony opening the new academic year was forced inside by weather, this year by rain from the remnants of Hurricane Isaac.)

Assistant Professor of Politics Stephen Engel connected political compromise with the characteristics of a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ education in his Convocation address. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College.

Kennedy was an apt choice of subject for Spencer’s talk. Yes, the Massachusetts senator afforded her the opportunity to share a bit of her past with a community that’s just getting to know her. More importantly, though, the senator was renowned for his effectiveness in crossing ideological boundaries in the Senate in order to get things done — in short, he was a master of compromise. And compromise was the theme of Convocation 2012.

Both Spencer’s remarks and the Convocation address by Stephen Engel, an assistant professor of politics who started at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ in 2011, explored that theme. (The other Convocation speakers were Dean of the Faculty Pam Baker ’70, student government President Umar Khan ’13 and Multifaith Chaplain Bill Blaine-Wallace.)

Their words fell on receptive ears, or so it was hoped, as the new students’ summer reading assignment was the political study The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It, by Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson (Princeton University Press, 2012).

The book argues that political campaigns, on the one hand, and governing, on the other, require antithetical mindsets and skill sets. In particular, the art of compromise is essential to effective governance, as it must satisfy diverse stakeholders. But the political establishment has lapsed into a “constant campaign” mode, a sort of wartime mentality whose extreme and unwavering positions leave no room for compromise, making good governance next to impossible.

Quoting columnist Robert Kuttner, President Spencer described Kennedy as a politician who “would work with the Devil to produce progressive legislation to better the condition of regular Americans.” In other words, he practiced what Gutmann and Thompson are preaching, and Spencer offered three anecdotes illustrating how “compromise played out in the legislative process before my very eyes.”

A little rain didn’t dampen student spirits on Convocation Day 2012. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College.

In two of her stories, Spencer played the zealous policy analyst raring to bend the Senate to the inevitability of her expertise — until Kennedy showed her a better way that would honor the sensibilities of their opponents and lead to legislation that would still advance the cause, while minimizing wounded feelings and keeping a light in the window for future collaborations.

Effective compromise, she told the Alumni Gym audience, “involves personal relationships, flexibility and a sense of timing” — when to press a point and when to wait. Moreover, because all people construct personal narratives that help them make sense of their lives and work, Spencer said that “part of working effectively with people is understanding that, and respecting the narratives of others.”

Spencer’s third vignette seemed especially relevant as, 830 miles away in her native state of North Carolina, the Democratic National Convention was getting under way. She recalled the aftermath of the elections of 1994, the year of the Contract with America and the Republican ascent in Congress. As Kennedy sought to preserve education funding in the face of budget-cutting pressure, he eschewed dialogue in favor of hardball tactics (such as importing Bay State students for a demonstration on the Senate floor) not to advance a specific bill, but to reframe the dialogue itself.

The lesson for the Class of 2016? “Always keep your larger goals in mind. And remember that you have to step back sometimes to reframe a problem in order to make progress.”

Making some historical detours to remind listeners that, though American politics seem dire right now, they’ve actually been worse, Engel related lessons of the assigned reading to the rewards of a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ education.

If ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ isn’t a legislature, he said, it shares with such bodies the imperative of engaging actively with ideas. “To do so successfully, to make good on the promise that the college makes to you, our community requires the very same foundation underlying the spirit of compromise, most notably mutual respect” — a concept that he took pains to distinguish from tolerance.

“Live and let live” is one thing, but mutual respect is more: It’s a consideration based on active engagement with the ideas of others, and on the willingness to re-examine our own ideas.

“So what we at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ ask of you — what we challenge you to do; what we give you the support to achieve — is that you seize opportunity to scrutinize the ideas and values you hold today, to test them against others and to listen intently to people different from yourselves,” he said.

“At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, you have the freedom to develop your ideas, to speak and to write with conviction and depth. But that freedom demands a simultaneous commitment to be responsible for the consequences of that speech, for the impact that your ideas and actions have on those around you.”

Members of the Class of 2016 walk to their AESOP orientation at Lake Andrews. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College.

Welcoming the most selective and geographically diverse class in the school’s history, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ begins its 2012-13 academic year on Tuesday, Sept. 4.

President A. Clayton Spencer, who took office July 1, offers her first official address as head of college during the annual Convocation ceremony, which marks the opening of the academic year. The eighth president of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, she will welcome the 503 members of the Class of 2016, as well as 17 transfer students new to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

The event begins at 4:10 p.m. on the historic Quad, at Campus Avenue and College Street. Rain site is Alumni Gymnasium, 130 Central Ave.

Stephen M. Engel, assistant professor of politics, will give the Convocation address. Titled On the Responsibility of a Liberal Arts Education, it will relate the need for compromise in a successful democracy to the attitudes that enable a successful education.

Dean of the Faculty Pamela Baker, Student Government President Umar Khan and Multifaith Chaplain William Blaine-Wallace will also speak during the ceremony.

Convocation addresses

Spencer’s and Engel’s addresses will each refer to the book that the class of 2016 was asked to read during the summer, The Spirit of Compromise: Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It, by Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson (Princeton University Press, 2012). Examining the qualities found in both effective governance and campaigning for office, argue that the rejection of compromise in contemporary American politics is linked to the development of a “constant campaign” mindset that leaves little room for actual governing.

In her remarks, titled Lessons in Compromise and Life Learned from a Master, Spencer will reflect on the Gutmann-Thompson book in light of her experience as a staffer in the U.S. Senate. From 1993 until 1997, as chief education counsel for the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, Spencer worked for the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, a politician known for his ability to cross ideological lines to advance important legislation.

Engel, who came to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ a year ago, will draw connections between higher education and effective governance in a democracy. “Governing requires working with one’s opposition, a prudent compromising on principle to achieve outcomes for the common good and clear elaboration of intersecting interests rather than stark distinctions,” he explains.

Good governance, he says, mirrors “the same approach that the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ education strives to inculcate: an openness to evidence, an eagerness toward meaningful debate, a readiness to re-evaluate and the willingness to converse with honesty and integrity.”

The class of 2016, by the numbers

For the new class, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ accepted 26.6 percent of the 4,905 applicants, the most selective the college has ever been. With 503 of the 1,304 admitted students choosing to enroll, the “yield” rate of 39 percent is an increase of 3 percentage points over last year’s rate.

The members of the class are 54 percent female and 46 percent male. A tenth of the class is from Maine, with seven students from Lewiston-Auburn. Eight percent come from other countries — 26 countries in all, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.

A third of the class ranked in the top 5 percent of their high school class academically. Ten percent of the incoming students represent the first generation in their families to attend college, and 16 percent are U.S. multicultural (African American, Asian American, Hispanic or Native American/Pacific Islander).

The speakers

Named as ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ president late last year, Spencer came to the college from Harvard University, where she served most recently as vice president for policy. Widely regarded as an effective and collaborative higher education leader, Spencer worked with four Harvard presidents to shape key initiatives over the past 15 years. She’s a graduate of Williams College and Yale Law School.

Engel’s research interests include American political development, constitutional development, relations among the branches of government and social movements, particularly gay and lesbian mobilization for social change.

He is the author of American Politicians Confront the Court: Opposition Politics and Changing Responses to Judicial Power (2011, Cambridge University Press), examining hostilities directed toward the federal judiciary by Congress or the president; and of The Unfinished Revolution: Social Movement Theory and the Gay and Lesbian Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2001).