The beginning is subtle.

Campus is still quiet, but suddenly there are unfamiliar faces in bare-shelved faculty offices.

The first upperclass students to return are coming and going around the dorms. Among those students are the AESOP leaders, who gather under Alumni Walk birches for training and earnest discussions.

A scavenger hunt dispatches Bobcat First! participants around the campus: “There’s the lake,” says one. “You mean the Puddle,” another responds.

These are portents of a new academic year at �ֲ���ý. And on Monday, Aug. 28 — Opening Day — those subtle signs will become surging activity as the Class of 2021 moves in.

Opening Day also begins Orientation for the 510 members of the class. There’s much to learn about the college, as well as about each other, during the nine days of Orientation. But Carrie Murphey, who organizes Orientation, emphasizes that it’s not a Bobcat boot camp.

For first-gen students, who arrive the week before Opening Day, the Bobcat First! program helps to foster a greater sense of well-being, belonging, and self-empowerment. Here are a few Bobcats First! students and program mentors: Kyle Larry ’21 of Chicago, Samantha Alexander ’20 of Menlow, Iowa, Doris Etienne ’20 of Brooklyn, N.Y., Anais Gonzalez ’20 of Hanford, Calif., Lebanos Mengistu ’21 of Somerville, Mass., and Samatar Iman ’21 of Auburn, Maine. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Instead, it’s a �ֲ���ý sampler. The goal is to “forecast the type of experience you can expect to have at �ֲ���ý,” says Murphey, assistant dean of students for first-year programs and an alumna herself, Class of 2006.

+Facts and figures about the Class of 2021

The new students will have ample opportunity, she explains, to “start to see where they might fit in at �ֲ���ý and who they might fit in with. They’ll begin to see themselves in the fabric of the community.”

Pointing new students and families toward their destinations is job No. 1 on Opening Day. In this image from 2016, members of Residence Life, AESOP trip leaders, and Orientation Week Leaders steer a dad toward Kalperis Hall. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

She says, “Academically, the first-years will have time with their First-Year Seminar instructors,” who are also first-year advisers. Residentially, they’ll get to know classmates assigned to their first-year centers, as well as the 42 Junior Advisors who direct the centers.

And, as always, �ֲ���ý’ fabled AESOP trips — the Annual Entering Student Outdoor Program — will encourage the newbies to bond with both upperclass expedition leaders and, of course, the Maine outdoors that is so important to the �ֲ���ý experience.

Four days long and comprising 56 different student-run trips or programs, AESOP provides a break in the middle of Orientation. On either side of AESOP, the new kids — and their parents, at least on Opening Day — are offered programs that combine practical information with an introduction to �ֲ���ý values and signature initiatives.

In 2015, Mickai Mercer ’19 of Philadelphia and a fellow first-year sit and sketch during their AESOP trip to the art colony on Monhegan Island. This year’s Monhegan trip is “Art/Meditation” with: Olga Revzina ’18 of Bethesda, Md., and John Ricatto ’18 of Ridgewood, N.J. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

For instance, Junior Advisors, along with Brooks Quimby debaters and discussants from faculty and staff, will guide the first-years in an exploration of the 2017 Common Reading. This year, the new class was assigned , lawyer-activist Bryan Stevenson’s 2014 examination of injustice in the criminal justice system.

That’s a subject much discussed by the �ֲ���ý community in recent years. “It is a heavy set of topics, and Stevenson doesn’t write about it in a way that lightens it at all,” Murphey says. “But it allows the reader to stick with it and be close to it.”

Echoing the college’s distinctive Purposeful Work initiative, a theme of the book “is getting close to the work that you do and the things that you care about,” Murphey continues.

“And it’s just such a compellingly written book about important social justice topics — race and socioeconomic class, all these things that we want students to build a foundation for talking about at �ֲ���ý.

First-Year Seminars begin during Orientation. In this 2016 image, Assistant Professor of Biology Brett Huggett teaches basic techniques to observe and document natural life to Paige Rabb ’20 of Stamford, Conn., a student in the First-Year Seminar “The Natural History of Maine’s Neighborhoods and Woods.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

If the Common Reading has �ֲ���ý looking outward, the Voices of �ֲ���ý program is introspective, introducing the college to its newest members. The program debuted last year with a deeply researched interpretative performance by Anike Tourse ’92. For this year, Portland, Maine-based filmmaker Yoon Byun has created a 20-minute video comprising �ֲ���ý people’s thoughts about the college and their experiences here.

“That’s themed around acknowledging that people come into �ֲ���ý with all sorts of different experiences,” says Murphey, “and that the strength of our community is built on how we exchange those experiences and how we honor and understand each other’s perspectives. And that we are truly a stronger community when we do that effectively.

“The hope is that this conversation on the second night of Orientation will be among the first of countless others they’ll have, in informal and formal ways, over the course of four years, and as alumni too.”

Shown in 2016, the Opening Day barbecue for new students and families is an annual tradition. The menu for 2017 includes pulled pork and chicken, chipotle tofu, and, this being Maine, three varieties of whoopie pies. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

A few hundred old (and not so old) �ֲ���ý hands will be around to help the newbies settle in on Monday. The upperclass students will include 24 Orientation Week Leaders (who? OWLs) and their coordinator; 65 Junior Advisors and Residence Coordinators; and 112 AESOP trip leaders, along with six AESOP coordinators.

In addition, Murphey notes, about 35 faculty First-Year Seminar instructors will meet first-years in advising sessions, and additional faculty will take part in the Common Reading and Voices of �ֲ���ý discussions. Some, she notes, will be around in part because they simply want to get a sense of the new arrivals.

Twenty-five or so �ֲ���ý staff in Welcome Crew T-shirts will be ready and willing to assist students and families in all kinds of ways. And they’re just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to staff hospitality on Opening Day, says Murphey.

“An incredible number of people in the college care deeply about welcoming new students and their families, and they’ll be around on Opening Day and throughout Orientation,” Murphey says — “helpful, warm, friendly, and just extending that characteristic �ֲ���ý spirit.”

Dan Gediman, co-creator of the “This I Believe” radio and book series, delivers the Convocation address on the historic Quad on Sept. 6, 2016. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

For �ֲ���ý’ 2016 Convocation speaker, college was “the perfect time to take stock of what I most enjoy doing and the things that brought great joy to me and that really intrigued me — and to sculpt out of that raw material a career that I’m still in today.”

Dan Gediman, a renowned radio producer and co-creator of the series of books and radio spots, offered that encouragement to the 499 members of the Class of 2020 during a wide-ranging and personal address on Sept. 6, 2016.

Gediman’s career reflections and their lessons for the new students formed the centerpiece of an hourlong Convocation ceremony on Sept. 6. The event served not only as a welcome to the new students and the new school year, but as an introduction to the ethos of the �ֲ���ý community in the context of This I Believe.

Under milky skies, Gediman shared the Coram Library stage with �ֲ���ý President Clayton Spencer, Student Government President Adedire Fakorede ’18 of Newark, N.J., and Multifaith Chaplain Brittany Longsdorf.

Members of the �ֲ���ý Class of 2020 listen to a Convocation speaker on the morning of Sept. 6, 2016. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The first in Gediman’s series of This I Believe books was assigned to the incoming class as its Common Reading, an initiative that helps introduce the first-years to the prevailing values at �ֲ���ý.

Borrowing the title and concept from a 1950s CBS radio series and book adaptation, the latter-day This I Believe project gives people from all walks of life a channel to share their essential philosophies with the world.

Gediman related a conversation with Spencer just minutes before the Convocation processional. “We only can see when we get older and we look back on life: the journey that we took to get where we are today.”

His journey was a serendipitous one that seemed to illustrate the Louis Pasteur quotation “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Gediman recounted, for example, how he decided to attend Antioch College because of a long conversation with the legendary Boston disk jockey Charles Laquidara: If the young Gediman wanted to be in radio, the WBCN personality advised, he should start by attending a school with a great campus station.

A first-year student holds a copy of the Common Reading assigned to the Class of 2020. Dan Gediman, co-editor of the “This I Believe” books and executive producer of NPR’s “This I Believe” radio program, delivered the Convocation address on Sept. 6. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Gediman also explained how a grant proposal that he submitted, almost capriciously, as a college senior ultimately led to his first national gig for public radio. And how, making ends meet as a street musician after funding for his radio documentaries dried up, he happened to meet his wife.

And how a bad case of the flu in 2003 led him to resurrect This I Believe: Feverish and bored, he read the book adaptation of the 1950s radio program hosted by journalism icon Edward R. Murrow. “I was utterly transfixed and transformed” by the book, Gediman said.

With producer and series host Jay Allison, Gediman created the This I Believe radio series for NPR in 2005, and he continues to produce and under the TIB brand.

Often in his career path, Gediman said, “fate intervened.” (That happens.) But the liberal arts education at Antioch equipped him to make the best of all those twists and bumps in the road, Gediman said (including meeting his wife, because a charismatic professor had encouraged him to develop his interest in music).

Although Gediman entered college with no clear idea about what he wanted from an education or from life, Antioch helped him develop two youthful passions — for radio and music — central to his professional and creative life. (In addition to his TIB work, Gediman is a singer-songwriter with four records to his credit.)

His education gave him “a taste for curiosity, a taste for reading, a taste for studying,” and a taste for following facts to see where they lead, Gediman said.

“This is an amazing journey that’s in front of you, and you have no idea where it’s going. You can think of that as something terrifying or you can think of that as something amazingly exciting.”

“I’m sure you came here with certain expectations on the part of your parents and guidance counselors and various advisers.” Yet, Gediman urged, “Just be open-minded. . . . Taste everything that a liberal arts education has to offer.” He added, “I want you, if you get nothing else out of my talk today, to not fear failure, to not fear setbacks.”

�ֲ���ý President Clayton Spencer, Convocation speaker Dan Gediman and Dean of the Faculty Matt Auer react to a light moment in Student Government President Adedire Fakorede’s greeting to the �ֲ���ý Class of 2020. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In her opening remarks, �ֲ���ý President Clayton Spencer offered a special welcome to the Class of 2020. “I love the ring” of that number, she said.

“It suggests a sharpness of focus, a clarity of vision,” she joked. “So we’re delighted that you can see so clearly that �ֲ���ý is where you belong.” (In that case, one wondered, were members of other classes more likely to make spectacles of themselves?)

More seriously, she advised the newbies to “dive into your courses, branch out to make friends, be deliberate in thinking about how you move through life on this campus — because it’s great practice for figuring out how you wish to move through the world.”

If Gediman’s name is on the This I Believe dust jacket, it was the �ֲ���ý president who set the book in the Convocation context. She suggested that the premise of the TIB project — the celebration of core beliefs held by all kinds of people — is analogous to the liberal arts campus.

“The variety of perspectives is great, and the unity lies in the realization that knowledge and feeling and experience begin to take shape in front of us as we move through the world,” she said. “And over time, if we are awake and aware, they come to consciousness as a set of values that guide us. In the liberal arts, we sometimes call this living an examined life.”

In view of the “downright frightening” state of current political and social discourse, she added, “This is a particularly important moment to pause and consider how one develops a personal belief system, and how that process interacts with the values and belief systems of others.”

Adedire A. Fakorede ’18 of Newark, N.J., president of the �ֲ���ý College Student Government, greets �ֲ���ý’ newest students during Convocation 2016. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

Spencer found herself drawn to a TIB essay by Iran native Azar Nafisi, a literary scholar living in the U.S. and the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran. “I believe in empathy,” Nafisi wrote in her 2003 essay. “I believe in the kind of empathy that is created through imagination and through intimate, personal relationships.”

For Nafisi, Spencer said, empathy entails curiosity about the fate of others. “It is this urge to know more about ourselves and others that creates the shock of recognition, of our shared humanity.

“Without empathy, Nafisi insists, there can be no genuine dialogue, and we as individuals and nations will remain isolated and alien, segregated and fragmented,” Spencer said. “There is no better place than a residential liberal arts college to learn empathy, to practice the art of entering curiously and imaginatively into the lives of others.”

Welcomed with generous applause, Fakorede offered the formal greeting to the new class. His overriding message was an oldie-but-goodie that works for everyone but may be especially apt for 18-year-olds: “Just be yourself and people will like you.”

“Your real personality is what brings friends and family to you. And being yourselves is what makes our school the very wonderful, vibrant, and diverse community that we call �ֲ���ý.”

In her benediction, Longsdorf built a metaphor of plants growing in soil nourished by the wisdom and kindness of the adults on campus. She told the Class of 2020, “Learn to be alive and thrive in this light-filled place.”

President Clayton Spencer follows as the college mace bearer, Charles Franklin Phillips Professor of Economics Michael Murray, leads the Convocation 2016 Recessional away from Coram Library. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“This I Believe” co-creator Dan Gediman.

What’s the essence of what you believe? What’s the philosophical DNA that shapes your actions and words?

And if you had just a few minutes to share your core beliefs with the world, what would you say?

�ֲ���ý’ incoming Class of 2020 devoted some time to such questions this summer. That’s because the 2016 Common Reading — the book that �ֲ���ý asks incoming first-years to read before the start of school — represents the core philosophies, in their own words, of dozens of Americans from all walks of life.

Running the gamut from former Secretary of State Colin Powell and computing mogul Bill Gates to a Massachusetts hospital clerk and a Yellow Pages ad representative in Texas, those 80 Americans were contributors to the NPR radio series “.”

The short essays that they read on the broadcast were adapted for a book with the same title. And nine years after its publication, the book This I Believe is the 2016 Common Reading at �ֲ���ý.

�ֲ���ý always follows up the summer reading assignment with programming during Orientation, and prominent in the programming this year is the Convocation address by Dan Gediman — an independent radio producer who, with producer Jay Allison, created “This I Believe” for NPR and edited the book.

Gediman will speak about This I Believe in the Convocation ceremony beginning at 11 a.m. Tuesday, Sept. 6. College President Clayton Spencer, Multifaith Chaplain Brittany Longsdorf, and the president of the �ֲ���ý College Student Government, Adedire Fakorede ’18 of Newark, N.J., will also offer remarks.

Classes begin the following day.

The Common Reading is designed to jumpstart first-year students’ engagement with �ֲ���ý both culturally and intellectually. Carrie Murphey ’06, assistant dean of students for first-year programs, explains that “This I Believe had particularly strong resonance with the Purposeful Work initiative,” a college-wide effort to help students harmonize their interests and beliefs with their life choices, especially in terms of career.

The essays in This I Believe inspire readers to examine their own personal beliefs, how they distilled them, and how they share them with others. “The book seemed a compelling choice, given the timing of the Common Reading, for first-year students as they consider their own guiding values and principles in preparation for four years of college,” Murphey says, “and for joining a community with many shared values.”

The longstanding Common Reading program was revised for 2016. Books being considered for the summer assignment are weighed against 18 goals that, taken together, describe a campus committed to diversity, community, mutual respect, and robust intellectuality.

The Common Reading is designed to jumpstart first-year students’ engagement with �ֲ���ý both culturally and intellectually.

This year for the first time, Murphey says, books were assessed by a committee comprising faculty; students working in the residence life program; and staff. Murphey co-chaired the committee along with Kirk Read, professor of French and francophone studies, and Margaret Imber, associate professor of classical and medieval studies and Read’s successor as associate dean of the faculty.

In addition to Gediman’s address, This I Believe programming for first-year students includes a debate by �ֲ���ý’ internationally known Brooks Quimby Debate Council, and pre-Convocation brunch discussions with guest staff or faculty discussants. In addition, some First-Year Seminars will incorporate the text into their syllabi.

The concept and title of This I Believe predated Gediman and Allison’s project by half a century. In 1951, a time of mounting political tensions in the United States, the renowned broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow and the CBS network originated This I Believe as a series of five-minute radio spots in which well-known Americans shared the essence of their beliefs.

Today, Gediman is executive director of This I Believe, a nonprofit that collects and presents the core personal philosophies of Americans.

That show lasted into 1955. Allison and Gediman picked up where Murrow had left off some 50 years before — but they opened their 2005–09 public radio series to essays contributed by Americans from all walks of life. (They also re-used essays from Murrow’s series for both their radio and book series.)

The initial This I Believe book spawned a series that’s now up to nine volumes, and an Essay Collection of more than 120,000 statements of belief can be found at

Today, Gediman is executive director of This I Believe, a nonprofit that collects and presents the core personal philosophies of Americans ranging from the famous to the previously unknown. A 25-year public radio veteran, his work has been heard on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Fresh Air, Marketplace, and This American Life. He has won many of public broadcasting’s most prestigious awards.

Members of the Class of 2016 walk to their AESOP orientation at Lake Andrews. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College.

Welcoming the most selective and geographically diverse class in the school’s history, �ֲ���ý 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 �ֲ���ý, she will welcome the 503 members of the Class of 2016, as well as 17 transfer students new to �ֲ���ý.

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 �ֲ���ý 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 �ֲ���ý 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, �ֲ���ý 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 �ֲ���ý’ 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).