During one of the spring 2010 meetings that ultimately produced �ֲ���ý’ current mission statement, the working group hit a roadblock.

“People were going back and forth about ways to look at something, and we were not coming to a consensus,” recalls Leslie Hill, associate professor of politics and a member of the mission statement subcommittee.

Then a student, one of four in the 14-member group, spoke up. “He spoke passionately. He articulated the issue in terms that were clear to him and, I think, different for some of the rest of us, but that brought some insight into what we were talking about,” Hill says.

+The �ֲ���ý College Mission Statement

“And I just remember thinking, ‘Wow, it is terrific that this young person could really open this back up again.’ He created an opportunity for us to hear each other better. And I was so impressed by that.”

Adopted 10 years ago this month, the 77-word �ֲ���ý mission statement has become a touchstone for the college community. “Any college that leads its mission statement with an affirmation of the ‘emancipating potential of the liberal arts’ is a place I want to be,” Clayton Spencer said at the ceremony announcing her appointment as college president, in December 2011.

And as Hill’s story suggests, the statement resulted from a collaboration that, a decade later, remains a bright memory for the people involved. “Other than those wonderful moments I have with students, that process was the most delightful thing I’ve been associated with at �ֲ���ý,” says Rebecca Herzig, who chaired the Mission and Purposes Subcommittee that crafted the statement as part of �ֲ���ý’ decadal accreditation review.

“The committee was wonderful,” says Herzig, a professor of gender and sexuality studies. “Just a marvelous, committed, smart group that represented a lot of facets of �ֲ���ý.”

Paul Gastonguay ’89, a committee member and the college’s tennis coach, agrees. “Everyone on the committee took great care to ensure that all of �ֲ���ý’ foundational and essential characteristics were authentically represented.”

Settling on a mission statement, whether existing or new, is an essential step in the college’s accreditation review. The statement is “the standard by which our performance on all the other standards is measured” during the review process, Herzig explains. (The 2000 review proceeded from the 1990 mission statement. And, yes, accreditation review is happening again now — but there are no plans to change the mission statement.)

Starting in February 2010 and facing a hard deadline — that May’s meeting of the Board of Trustees, whose approval would activate the statement — “we were working fast.” They had just three months not just to forge a draft, but to secure buy-in from “as many possible individuals and constituencies as we could,” Herzig explains.

“And we did it” — winning unanimous approval from the trustees.

From start to finish, in fact, the process was painstakingly consultative. “We sought out expertise wherever we could find it,” says Herzig.

“We talked to poets about tone and rhythm. We talked to classicists about various interpretations of the motto,” the Latin Amore ac Studio (“with ardor and devotion”). “We talked to archivists about text we could mine for ideas, and to alumni about what stuck with them most about their �ֲ���ý educations.”

To reach students, the team held a “Mission Night” in Commons, put a draft of the statement on napkin holders in the Den, ran ads in The �ֲ���ý Student, and got air time on campus radio station WRBC-FM. They even showed the draft to prospective families visiting campus, who were surprised “that we might care what they thought,” Herzig says.

The speed of creating the statement is all the more striking when you consider the thematic burden the Mission and Purposes Subcommittee had to bear. First of all, of course, the statement needed to, er, state what �ֲ���ý does: It “educates the whole person through creative and rigorous scholarship in a collaborative residential community.”

But there were aspirational values to assert and to align with that academic function — imperatives of equity and inclusion and of environmental sustainability, for instance, not to mention the hoped-for ethical posture of �ֲ���ý graduates. And there were guiding voices to summon forth, notably those of �ֲ���ý founder Oren Cheney (whose “college for coming time” gained an “s” for clarity — “coming times”) and of educator and civil rights leader Rev. Benjamin Mays, Class of 1920.

Mays, in fact, inspired one of the most-cited phrases in the mission statement. In Born to Rebel, his autobiography, he credited the college with “making it possible for me to emancipate myself, to accept with dignity my own worth as a free man.” The mission statement, in turn, leads off with the college’s dedication to “the emancipating potential of the liberal arts.”

Equally powerful is “the transformative power of our differences,” which is not only a potent phrase in and of itself but, in its context in the mission statement, is revealed as the engine of the �ֲ���ý enterprise.

Not surprisingly, “there was some real wrestling around the phrase ‘transformative power,’” as Leslie Hill recalls. The subcommittee needed to reconcile �ֲ���ý’ historic invocation of diversity with a contemporary understanding of equity and inclusion. “It has a different meaning and, of course, different opportunities and possibilities,” Hill says. Moreover, they needed to make inclusiveness “more substantial — not simply to add ‘different faces’ to the community, but rather figure out how their presences enrich the community.”

Crafting the mission statement “gave us an opportunity to articulate and debate what we really think we’re trying to do.”

In short, there was a lot to load into a text that, the subcommittee believed, needed to be much shorter than its 283-word predecessor. “In its conciseness, the new statement gave us bite-sized values, priorities, and action steps that we could look at, understand, recite, and act upon,” says Marianne Cowan ’92, a member of the subcommittee who is now Associate Director of Program Design for �ֲ���ý’ Center for Purposeful Work.

“And it gave us something to talk about to an external audience — especially, perhaps, the 17-year-old high school student — so they understand who we are and what’s important to us.”

It’s a testament to the subcommittee’s powers of perception, distillation, and balance that, 10 years later, the �ֲ���ý mission statement is so present in the daily life of the college. It has been the basis for admission essays and has informed course design. And its language resonates in campus proclamations large and small.

“I’m continually struck by how frequently and how divergently �ֲ���ý people pull on the mission statement,” Herzig says. “People call on it as a tool to crack open conversations, to move forward with ambitions, projects, hopes. They use it to critique things that they find troubling. ‘Why aren’t we living up to the mission in this way?’”

Part of that utility, naturally, resides in those 77 words themselves. But the process itself of assembling them, she says, also influenced the �ֲ���ý culture. “It gave us an opportunity to articulate and debate what we really think we’re trying to do.”

One student on the subcommittee has carried insights from that process into his professional life. Now a postdoctoral research fellow at The New School for Social Research, Mikey Pasek ’12 earned a doctorate in social psychology at Penn State and now studies how people with different ethnic and religious identities cooperate or clash with one another across group lines.

Thanks to his mission statement experience, “I pay acute attention to the way that organizations and colleges describe their mission,” Pasek says. “Understanding how a school sees itself tells me a lot about whether it is the type of organization I’d want to dedicate myself to.”

It’s a harsh irony that the �ֲ���ý mission statement’s 10th anniversary comes just as fate, in the form of COVID-19, is challenging the college and its guiding ethos in ways that could have hardly been predicted. For most of the past decade, for example, one of the statement’s concepts most taken for granted was �ֲ���ý’ essential nature as a “residential community.” But no one’s taking it for granted these days.

Still, as another member of the 2010 mission statement subcommittee points out, that statement itself carries the seeds of its own re-invention. “It seems like a sort of romanticized or idealistic vision of who we are, but it’s really much more than that,” says Marcus Bruce ’77, professor of religious studies.

“As we try to get oriented in the midst of crisis, especially one that impacts us on so many different levels, it’s important to have that mission statement as a guide in terms of our history and our vision of ourselves at a particular period of time and what we envision for the future.

“I think it’s really important.”

The theme of making a difference in the world is standard issue in the ceremonies that open and close academic years.

At �ֲ���ý’ 2018 Convocation, though, that theme gained sharp new urgency thanks to some moving personal testimony, three thought-provoking questions, and a fresh visit to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “arc of the moral universe.”

In her Sept. 4 welcome to the 550 members of the incoming Class of 2022, �ֲ���ý President Clayton Spencer used King’s famous passage to explore how �ֲ���ý helps students sort out their callings — and where the college’s social justice ethos fits into that.

Speaking during Convocation on Sept. 4, 2018, �ֲ���ý President Clayton Spencer welcomes the Class of 2022 to �ֲ���ý, and the entire campus community to the start of a new academic year. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Also speaking were Associate Professor of History Joseph Hall, chosen by the departing Class of 2018 last spring to give the Convocation address; �ֲ���ý Student Government President Walter Washington ’19, greeting the new students on behalf of the older ones for the second year; and Multifaith Chaplain Brittany Longsdorf, who gave the benediction.

Spencer bookended her welcome with one of the most inspiring statements to come from the civil rights movement: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” (King adapted the theme from the writings of 19th-century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker.)

King’s maxim “expresses a thought that I once found reassuring,” said Spencer, “but now it feels dangerously like false hope, cold comfort, or a seriously misplaced sense of inevitability.” Is that arc, she asked, “really bending toward justice in Syria, in Venezuela, in Myanmar, in our schools, on our city streets, at our borders, in our public discourse?”

If Parker intended this thought as an “affirmation of hope,” Spencer continued, “I also hear it as a call to action — as did President Obama, who said that if the arc is going to bend toward justice, it’s not going to do it on its own. We have to get in there and use our best efforts to bend it.”

Why tell this to the college’s newest students? Because, the president explained, �ֲ���ý is a place to figure out “who you are and how you’ll make a difference in the world.” It’s a place whose own moral universe is codified by its mission statement, which reads, in part, “With ardor and devotion, we engage the transformative power of our differences, cultivating intellectual discovery and informed civic action.”

Mixed emotions are abundantly evident as the Class of 2022 lines up on Alumni Walk prior to Convocation. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Ardor, devotion, and engagement with difference: moral practices to which Spencer added a fourth. “Intellectual discovery and informed civic action unfold out of a prior commitment to what I will call empathy,” she said, broadly defining that term as a way of “approaching ideas, people, or situations with a stance of curiosity and fundamental openness.”

Quotations from two American writers, one contemporary and one from the 1850s, expanded that notion of empathy. In his introduction to The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote that “it contributes greatly toward a man’s moral and intellectual health to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.”

And Spencer cited a June 29 New York Times that likened art to empathy: “It expands the moral imagination and makes it impossible to accept the dehumanization of others. When we are without art, we are a diminished people, myopic, unlearned, and cruel.”

As they immerse themselves in �ֲ���ý, Spencer told the first-years, “figure out which questions compel you most deeply, which modes of inquiry stimulate your curiosity and begin to feel intuitive, and which forms of expression engage your creativity and help you shape your own unique worldview.”

Hornist John Boden performs with the �ֲ���ý Brass Quintet prior to Convocation 2018. The musical prelude included works by Sir Charles Hubert Parry, J. S. Bach, and Thomas Morely. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

But there was a caveat. “Paradoxically, this journey of self-discovery only works if you’re willing at every turn to get outside yourself, to engage with difference — and, much more important, to be prepared to be transformed by this act.”

“Do your part while you’re here to bend the arc.”

A compelling speaker, Washington ’19 exemplified Spencer’s charge to the new class. Returning to campus after a summer working for a firm that provides legal aid for disadvantaged people, he told the new students about helping to resolve two eye-opening cases in which landlords had made life intolerable for their tenants.

In one, the management of a trailer park refused to correct problems, including life-safety issues, with several units. In the other, a military veteran had been evicted because he had stopped paying rent — but he had stopped rent because the landlord wouldn’t fix problems with the apartment.

Washington first met the veteran in a parking lot where he was living in his car.

Speakers at Convocation 2018 lead the Sept. 4 processional: from left, Multifaith Chaplain Brittany Longsdorf (red gown), �ֲ���ý Student Government President Walter Washington ’19, historian and Convocation keynote speaker Joseph Hall, and �ֲ���ý President Clayton Spencer. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“It became apparent to me,” Washington said, “that in order to effectuate the change that we want to see within this world, we’ve got to spend more time getting closer to those forgotten within our society, and spend more time in uncomfortable situations that place us amongst the forgotten.

“In a lot of ways, it was those people that showed me what true compassion, true equality, and true justice was all about.”

Hall used his time at the lectern to reflect on the role of questions as quests, as journeys in which small answers accumulate into major understandings.

“Ideally, you’re going to have the space to [ask questions] in your classrooms,” at �ֲ���ý, he said. “But there might be other questions that intrigue you that don’t fit in those spaces. I hope you do the work to make those spaces” — a process Hall then demonstrated, making space amidst �ֲ���ý’ Convocation to raise three thought-provoking questions about the college’s founding.

“How many of you have heard that �ֲ���ý College was founded by Oren Cheney, who was an abolitionist?” Hall asked the audience. More than half raised their hands, after some coaxing.

Associate Professor of History Joseph Hall delivers the 2018 Convocation address, titled “Questions for �ֲ���ý,” on Sept. 4. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Hall recounted the story of �ֲ���ý’ founding by Cheney, a Freewill Baptist and abolitionist who “believed deeply in the equality of all people, such that he believed that anyone should be admitted to what was in 1855 the Maine State Seminary, regardless of their racial background or gender,” he said.

“How many of you know that �ֲ���ý College is named after Benjamin �ֲ���ý, an industrialist who established the textile mills downtown in Lewiston?” Again, a respectable show of hands. Hall explained that when Cheney wanted to remake the seminary as a liberal arts college, in the 1860s, �ֲ���ý the industrialist was a key financial supporter.

“Third question,” said Hall. “How many of you know that the cotton textiles that Benjamin �ֲ���ý and others were weaving in Lewiston were made, until 1865, from cotton grown by enslaved people in the South of the United States?” Fewer hands went up that time.

This troubling paradox, Hall explained, seemingly went unaddressed by Cheney himself, the deep-dyed abolitionist who damned slavery as “a giant sin against God and an awful crime against man.”

As members of the incoming Class of 2022 look on, mace bearer Michael Murray, Charles Franklin Phillips Professor of Economics, leads the 2018 Convocation recessional away from Coram Library. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Yes, Hall pointed out, Cheney likely would have rejected financial backing directly from a Southern plantation owner. But, as a diary from 1864 revealed, he was happy to accept $10,000 from industrialist �ֲ���ý, whose wealth was derived in part from the unpaid trevails of plantation slaves.

Hall’s point was that such moral hopscotch — and the corresponding imperative to keep the questions coming — persists today. Quoting last May’s Commencement address by Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson, Hall said that Americans remain “burdened by our history of racial inequality.

“It’s in the air in Maine, just like it’s in the air in Mississippi. It doesn’t matter where you go, there is this contaminant that we’re all breathing in.” Hall wondered, “Can talking more fully about Oren Cheney, his vision and his compromises, and also his silences, help us see a little better this contaminated air?”

“These are only my questions,” added Hall. “One of the things that both Walter and Clayton made very clear is that your quest, your development, depends on your questions…and the answers I hope you get from the people around you.”

Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College

And Benjamin Mays ’20 was one of them. When the statement declares that �ֲ���ý has always “been dedicated to the emancipating potential of the liberal arts,” it’s a tribute to the great civil rights leader and educator. Mays wrote in his autobiography that �ֲ���ý “did not ‘emancipate’ me; it did the far greater service of making it possible for me to emancipate myself.”

The mission statement was produced in conjunction with the College’s process of reaccreditation. While not every contributor owns a word in the final language, its creation was an open, overtly collaborative five-month effort that drew hundreds of suggestions and comments from the College community.

The result, in turn, will tickle the �ֲ���ý-sense of nearly any member of that community.

“We were trying to get at why difference matters.”

The mission statement, for instance, affirms that �ֲ���ý people “engage the transformative power of our differences.” Students on the mission statement committee put forth the concept of “transformative” early on, says committee chair Rebecca Herzig, professor of women and gender studies. Alums later confirmed the rightness of that word as a �ֲ���ý descriptor.

The �ֲ���ý mission statement, says Rebecca Herzig, gets at “why difference matters.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In juxtaposing “transformative” and “differences,” Herzig continues, “we were trying to get at why difference matters. We realized that the transformative effect of the College happens most often when people bump up against people who are quite different from them.”

Ending the mission statement is a phrase that, in a sense, began the whole �ֲ���ý enterprise: “�ֲ���ý is a college for coming times.”

These words are adapted from founder and first president Oren Cheney’s pitch to Lewiston residents for the proposed school. He proposed establishing an institution for “coming time” — no “s.”

The mission statement committee “realized that people would think we just forgot the ‘s’” if they used Cheney’s exact text, Herzig explains. There was some concern, she adds, that the original reflected a denominational orientation.

“So we altered it slightly to evoke Cheney — but to also look more explicitly to the plurality of possible futures that lie ahead.” — DLH

In this issue:

1. Video: Graduates share thoughts on four years at �ֲ���ý
2. Multimedia: Athletics Celebration Dinner honors generations of supporters
3. Multimedia: Reunion 2010 celebration
4. President’s baccalaureate address on role of ‘friendship and friendliness’
5. Video: New �ֲ���ý mission statement approved
6. Higher rates now offered for �ֲ���ý charitable gift annuities
7. How can the act of writing help college students feel engaged?
8. June blog from Japan
9. Duncan nominated by NESCAC as NCAA Woman of the Year
10. Coaches, student-athletes pitch in on community service projects
11. �ֲ���ý in the News

1. Video: Graduates share thoughts on four years at �ֲ���ý
Each year, graduating seniors attending a luncheon with �ֲ���ý Trustees are invited by President Elaine Tuttle Hansen to offer brief comments on their time at �ֲ���ý. See a sampling of our latest graduates’ reflections.

2. Multimedia: Athletics Celebration Dinner honors generations of supporters
The Bobcat sports year ended in late May but the cheering continued well into June with two events central to the �ֲ���ý athletics experience. A June 12 groundbreaking celebrated the donor-funded Garcelon Field project during Reunion. Five days later in Boston, the �ֲ���ý Athletics Celebration Dinner honored a wide spectrum of sports legends and athletics contributors from many generations.

3. Multimedia: Reunion 2010 celebration
Alumni from classes ending in 0’s and 5’s returned to campus to enjoy their Reunion along with many �ֲ���ý Outing Club alumni who returned to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the BOC. Weekend stories, award citations, photos and videos:
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4. President’s baccalaureate address on role of ‘friendship and friendliness’
If you didn’t hear it at the 2010 Commencement, the text of President Elaine Tuttle Hansen’s baccalaureate address is now online. Hansen explored the role of friendship and friendliness in a �ֲ���ý education: “This is a place distinguished by its ‘friendly’ atmosphere,” she said at the May 30 ceremony, “where, as one of the parents here today put it three or four years ago, students quickly experience ‘that glue of belonging.'”
Read the full address:
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5. Video: New �ֲ���ý mission statement approved
Concluding a three-year review, the �ֲ���ý College Board of Trustees unanimously approved a new Mission Statement of the College at its spring meeting. The subcommittee from throughout the College that developed the mission statement offered some thoughts, in video clips and text, about what the different words and phrases mean to them.

6. Higher rates now offered for �ֲ���ý charitable gift annuities
The Office of Gift Planning is pleased to announce that in keeping with the latest guidelines from the American Council on Gift Annuities, we now offer higher rates for charitable gift annuities. This is a great opportunity to make a legacy gift to �ֲ���ý while generating a fixed stream of income – now or in the future – for yourself and/or someone you love, all with attractive tax advantages. For more information, contact us at 800-762-3145 or email: giftplanning [at] bates [dot] edu, or call Erin Martin, Director of Gift Planning, directly at 207-786-8373.

7. How can the act of writing help college students feel engaged?
A recent �ֲ���ý-hosted conference explored the various and sometimes unexpected ways that writing can help students feel more connected to their academic work. Underscoring the theme, five �ֲ���ý students told a roomful of academics how their writing assignments helped — and hindered — their own satisfaction in college.

8. June blog from Japan
From June 6-19, Associate Professor of English Eden Osucha and students Astrid Gleaton and Kaad Jones were �ֲ���ý’ representatives to Technos International Week  /technos.xml at Tokyo’s Technos College, along with faculty and students from seven other U.S. colleges and colleges in the U.K., New Zealand and Taiwan. The annual trips are made possible through a gift of the Tanaka Memorial Foundation. The �ֲ���ý trio recorded their experiences and impressions as they explored Japan together.

9. Duncan nominated by NESCAC as NCAA Woman of the Year
Vantiel Elizabeth Duncan ’10 is one of two student-athletes the New England Small College Athletic Conference has chosen to submit as its nominees for the 2010 NCAA Woman of the Year Award.
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10. Coaches, student-athletes pitch in on community service projects
Many coaches and staff members from the �ֲ���ý Department of Athletics teamed up in a service project in conjunction with Rebuilding Together Lewiston/Auburn on May 22. Earlier in the month, approximately 150 �ֲ���ý student-athletes hosted the Third Annual SAAC Field Day program, leading and participating in a wide array of outdoor games and recreational activities.
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11. �ֲ���ý in the News
In congressional testimony about the Gulf oil spill, environmental risk expert Valerie Lee ’75 invokes the concept of “human frailty.” Another human quality is referenced in a Cleveland Plain Dealer column praising the work of young “Cleveland believers,” including Graham Veysey ’04. Meanwhile, the �ֲ���ý Museum of Art retrospective exhibition of works by painter Joseph Nicoletti, who has taught at �ֲ���ý since 1981, elicits critical praise as careful and exacting as the painter’s own work.