Mustafa Basij-Rasikh ’12 of Kabul, Afghanistan, and Romina Istratii ’12 of Athens, Greece, offer welcomes in their native languages (plus Chinese) at the dedication of renovated Hedge Hall and Roger Williams Hall on Oct. 27, 2011.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9tSjA7Fjgs

Former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell offers the keynote address during the “Open to the World” events on Oct. 27. Photograph by Rene Minnis.

Sharing the Chapel chancel with 15 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students supported in their studies by a statewide program that he founded, former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell used incidents from his own life to drive home higher education’s value to both personal growth and economic success.

Praising ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ as a college “in the forefront of higher education,” Mitchell addressed the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ community Oct. 27 following the dedication ceremony for newly renovated Hedge and Roger Williams halls.

• Video: George’s Mitchell’s keynote address
  

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ President Nancy Cable introduced Mitchell with an impressive summation of the senator’s long career in public service.

George Mitchell, whose Mitchell Institute provides scholarships to Maine students, greets ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Mitchell Scholars on Oct. 27. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

“The United States is the first true meritocracy in human history,” Mitchell told about 200 people in the Chapel. But that meritocracy is broken if its benefits aren’t available to all Americans. “We have to make certain that we can draw on the talents of every member of our society,” and improving access to higher education is one way to do that. (In discussing the rising inaffordability of higher education, Mitchell’s speech anticipated the college-costs symposium scheduled for Saturday, Oct. 29.)

Mitchell pulled out statistics to support the common wisdom that more education means greater financial health. In Maine, he said, recent studies have indicated that people holding a bachelor’s degree earn 50 percent more than those who don’t. Similarly, those who stopped with a high school diploma are more than twice as likely to be unemployed than B.A. holders.

“We have a huge challenge in front of us,” he said, “but it’s also a huge opportunity, and it can provide a huge benefit to our state and our society,” meaning the higher tax revenues and lower government spending that come with higher rates of college graduation.

“It is a good investment to help young people go to college.”

Former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell answers questions following his “Open to the World” keynote address as Associate Professor of Politics John Baughman looks on. Photograph by Rene Minnis.

In a parallel to a story told during the dedication by Paul Marks ’83, Mitchell used his own example to illustrate the transformational role education can have. During a question-and-answer session that followed his address, he described growing up in Waterville, Maine, a son of a woman who was a Lebanese immigrant and a father of Irish extraction. A poor athlete among siblings highly accomplished in sports, Mitchell had poor self-esteem and was an indifferent student.

But a teacher at Waterville High School took Mitchell aside, gave him a book (John Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down) and told him to read it and give her an oral report on it. He read the book that night, she gave him another, and what followed was a literary year that turned Mitchell, a future federal judge, senator, peace-broker and author, into a reader. “My life would have been very different” without that teacher, he said.

Years later, as senator, Mitchell attended a University of Maine conference examining the aspirations of Maine’s young people. The message from the conference was that many young people in Maine, especially rural and low-income, had low aspirations.

Former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell speaks with a guest during a reception following Mitchell’s “Open to the World” keynote address.

After the conference, hoping to serve as a role model, Mitchell set himself the goal of visiting every Maine high school twice, once to speak at graduation and once to meet with students and teachers. “I saw in the eyes of many of those students a mirror image of myself at their age,” he said.

What grew out of that effort was the Mitchell Institute, founded in 1994. Based in Portland, the institute grants a Mitchell Scholarship to a graduating senior from every public high school in Maine who will attend a two-or four-year postsecondary degree program. Among the more than 1,800 Mitchell Scholars to date, 93 have attended ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, Mitchell said.

The institute has an especially close connection to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, as ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ own William Hiss ’66, longtime admissions dean and now a development officer, was, Mitchell said, “the most influential person in advising how this program would be set up and implemented. “He was, and is, one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, in the field of education and beyond.”

(He was so impressed by Hiss that at one point, he asked Hiss to lead the institute. Hiss declined, but recommended someone else for the job — his wife, Colleen Quint ’86. A former Mitchell staffer in the Senate, she has been executive director since 1999.)

Mitchell has still another ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ connection in the late Edmund S. Muskie ’36, whom he described as “my mentor, my hero and ultimately my friend.” A former aide to Muskie during his long tenure in the U.S. Senate, Mitchell was later tapped to fill the Senate seat Muskie vacated when he became U.S. Secretary of State under President Jimmy Carter.

Mitchell concluded his formal speech by describing the satisfaction he felt, from the perspective of an immigrant’s son, as a federal judge presiding over naturalization ceremonies. After the ceremonies, he used to ask the new Americans about their stories and why they wanted to be citizens. One young man, not yet a great English speaker, answered, “I came here because in America everybody has a chance.”

Mitchell said, “A young man who had been an American for 10 minutes, who could barely speak English, was able to sum up the meaning of being an American in a single sentence.”

Professor of Philosophy Mark Okrent gets a close look as board chairman Mike Bonney ’80 (left) and President Nancy Cable do the ribbon cutting. Photograph by Rene Minnis.

The journey of Paul Marks ’83 from ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ to China, and from being “a fairly unengaged student” to an international business leader, made an ideal narrative for the ceremonial reopening of Roger Williams and Hedge halls, facilities newly repurposed for the academic exploration of border crossings — borders national, cultural, philosophical, spiritual, disciplinary.

• Video: Paul Marks ’83 and fellow speakers at the dedication

Now based in Shanghai and CEO of the global aerospace technology firm Argosy Inc., Marks was one of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ first students to graduate with a China-focused history major. His address at the dedication ceremony recounted how a Short Term trip to China in 1981, 30 years ago this year, was the challenge that set him on his life’s path.

Remarks by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ board chair Michael Bonney ’80, college President Nancy Cable and Student Government President Cosmin Ghita ’12 were also on the program for the dedication late Thursday afternoon. Two symbolic acts completed the ceremony, as the faculty and staff who are the buildings’ stakeholders received honorary keys to Hedge and the Bill, and a ribbon-cutting made their reopening official.

Paul Marks ’83 speaks to the dedication audience about his defining experience in China in 1981. Photograph by Rene Minnis.

As Marks recalled, his parents were not thrilled about the notion of his going to China. It took the persuasive powers of Professor of Sociology George Fetter, who had arranged ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ first-ever Short Term expedition to China two years previous, to bring them around.

Fetter had promised Marks that the trip would “change his life.” That prediction came true. During five weeks in China, Marks told his listeners, “I became hooked on China. I wanted to understand this chaotic, totally different world.”

Part of the attraction was a spur to his competitive spirit from the group’s Chinese guide, who insisted that the foreigners couldn’t learn the language. Marks rose to the challenge, betting the guide five bucks that he could indeed learn Mandarin. With his first instructor at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ an adjunct faculty member who was the wife of a local Taiwanese dentist, Marks became ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ first student of the Chinese language, and continued his studies as a postgraduate.

In his welcome, Bonney, CEO of the pharmaceuticals firm Cubist, stated the theme for this celebration of two new academic buildings. “Faculty at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ are helping students [prepare] to live, to work, to think, to lead and ultimately to solve problems in the global society. These two buildings are spaces that foster that kind of learning.”

“The decision to renovate these buildings was not an easy decision, Bonney said, owing to their age and condition after years of hard use as residence halls. “And yet we stand here today with two remarkable buildings that do honor to our history, but also position us beautifully for the future.”

Bonney was the right person to situate the buildings’ symbolic role in the context of time, as his family has been associated with ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ for nearly a century, roughly the same amount of time that the Bill and Hedge have been here. (And he and Marks, who were both students during Roger Bill’s heyday as a meeting place for, let’s say, joie de vivre, took the opportunity to point out that a benefit of the renovation was the elimination of the spilled-beer smell.)

Board chair Mike Bonney presents a symbolic key to Roger Williams Hall to Spanish professor Claudia Aburto Guzmán. Photograph by Rene Minnis.

“These two academic buildings, and the campus at large, are powered by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ faculty,” Cable told the 175 or so listeners gathered in a tent on Alumni Walk, near the Bill and Hedge. “It is the faculty’s attention to the individual that makes the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ experience so vitally special and distinctive academically.

“Paul’s stories inform our sense of what lasts over time, from the simple connection of a faculty member to a student, the heart of what we do.”

The ceremony began with international students Mustafa Basij-Rasikh ’12 of Kabul, Afghanistan, and Romina Istratii ’12 of Athens, Greece, welcoming the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ community in their native languages (Istratii, anticipating Marks’ subject, also offered a greeting in Chinese, which she is studying at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½).

Ghita, of Bucharest, Romania, touched on the chilly dampness of the day in his remarks, bringing the thought neatly around to the ceremony’s theme of global citizenship. “Cultures around the world perceive rain as an omen of good fortune,” he pointed out. “I never would have known that had I not immersed myself in the study of another language.”

From left, Mary Rice-DeFosse, Francisca López, and Jane Costlow listen as Rhea Coté Robbins reads one of her poems.

It had to be said: Sometimes, “something gets found in translation, too.”

This truth was stated during the opening of Translations: Cross-Cultural Exchange Through Poetry, the second edition of an innovative festival dedicated to the translation of poetry, a creative act every bit as demanding as the making of a new poem.

The speaker was Jane Costlow, professor of environmental studies, who welcomed the listeners filling Chase Lounge late in the afternoon of Oct. 25. If poet Robert Frost felt that poetry gets lost in translation, Costlow said, what gets found is “the beginning of wisdom”: a glimmering of our own places amidst “the vast variety of human creativity.”

Poet Rhea Coté Robbins reads.

The session was the first of five readings during the , which runs through Oct. 29 (and includes a conference on the practice of translation). Most of the poets write in languages other than English, and the festival’s format is the simultaneous presentation of poems in both the author’s voice and English translations, created by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ faculty and students and projected as text on a screen.

Following Costlow’s welcome were readings by poets Rhea Coté Robbins, a Franco-American writer, editor and teacher from Brewer, Maine; and Francisca López, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ professor of Spanish.

Costlow established a helpful conceptual landscape for the listeners. She situated the festival in the context of the week’s Open to the World: ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Celebrates Unbounded Learning events, marking the renovation of two academic buildings that are, as she said, “devoted to the study of language, culture and our complex ethical relationships to each other and to the more-than-human world.”

And Costlow suggested that the meanings of poetry are not always textual. “I invite you, for at least part of each poet’s reading, to forget about what it means, and just submerse yourself in the music.”

The music began with Coté Robbins, whose early life in “down the Plains” — a Francophone neighborhood in the Maine mill town of Waterville — resonated through her work. She was one of the festival’s two poets reading in English (the other being ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ senior lecturer in English ). Reading quickly and undramatically, she delivered more than 20 poems animated by the tensions of unattainable dreams and of class and gender conflict.

From left, poets Naomi Otsubo and Polina Barskova listen attentively.

In her father’s mill the papermaking machines cook, gas, electrocute and eat the workers. The bosses in her mother’s shirt factory urge the women to work “Faster, Faster, Faster.” Women — Coté herself, Peyton Place author Grace Metalious — negotiate the visceral conflict between creative and family needs.

“We Spread the Dirt” depicts Coté Robbins and family bringing to her parents’ graves soil from France, in lieu of the homeland visit they could never make:

we are priests
without ritual—
Eiffel Tower pink-tinted dirt and rocks
for her
France-on-the-Loire brown
country farmer’s soil
for him

A native of Andalusia, in southern Spain, López writes poetry in Spanish. The festival translations of her 13 poems were created by departmental colleague and festival organizer Claudia Aburto Guzmán.

Francisca López speaks with a member of the audience after the reading.

López described herself as a rational person for whom poetry is a way to address the questions that rationality can’t touch. Where Coté’s work was markedly social and political, López’s poems were more abstract, organic, inward-looking, intimate. Her reading style, too, was softer, closer.

“Jump to the Abyss” was an attempt to make sense of a student’s senseless death:

you greet, joke, toast with someone
in the distance

and get closer . . .
to the wings of glass

for your flight
toward the encounter.

“The Soul’s Rags” could be about the people of our past who become like ghosts: “you lay dozing with me / in the silence of eternity.” “The Kiss” may describe the imbalance of power in a passionate encounter:

You keep the air
the hunger and thirst
the joy and sorrow
the need to move on

A senior from Pomona, Calif., double-majoring in Spanish and in women and gender studies, Jeanette Mariscal was running the Translations slide projection for the second year. Last year, she said, hearing German poet Lothar Quinkenstein gave her a whole new sense of the expressive capability of the German language.

Hearing poetry as opposed to simply taking it off the page, she said, “gives it life. When they read it, you get a better feel for their thinking.”

“In truth, poetry is as much a performance as anything else,” Aburto Guzmán remarked after the readings. “All these poets are good at that.”

Professor of Environmental Studies Jane Costlow welcomes Chase Hall listeners. Google Earth presentations showed the poets’ journeys.

French professor Alex Dauge-Roth gestures during the faculty conversation about global citizenship held prior to the dedication of Hedge and Roger Williams halls. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ global reach has been a driving theme behind , a celebration of new academic spaces including Roger Williams Hall, home to the college’s foreign language programs and Off Campus Study Office.

So the foreign language faculty took an hour or so during the afternoon of Oct. 27, the day the newly renovated Bill and Hedge Hall were dedicated, to present a sampling of courses and projects in their repertoire.

Dedicated to the idea of educating students for global citizenship, here are a few highlights from the presentation in the brand-new Language Resource Center:

• Alex Dauge-Roth, associate professor of French, talked about his course “Border and Disorders in French and Francophone Literature and Films.” An apt choice for a week of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ programming devoted to breaking down borders, the course examines representations of inclusion and exclusion — for example, two opposing political ads that use, in nearly identical ways, the symbol of a black sheep among white ones to support either openness to immigration or rejection of it. “The idea is to complexify for students how they define their borders,” Dauge-Roth said. “You cannot be at home without excluding others.”
• Against a backdrop of Central European images taken last year by Rachel Morrison ’13, Professor of German Craig Decker offered a capsule history of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Fall Semester Abroad programs in Vienna and Berlin. Noting that all FSA programs, not just the German-language trips, are interdisciplinary by design, he said, “It’s interesting to see how students combine what goes on in the two courses.” It’s a kind of synthesis “that doesn’t always happen on campus.”
• Sarah Strong, professor of Japanese, cut to the heart of cross-cultural exchange in describing her course “The Fantastic in Modern Japan.” Looking at comics, fiction and anime film, the course encourages students to discover what’s common among cultures — but more important, to “encounter what is unfamiliar that they can learn about and bring into their sphere of understanding.” For example, how the young heroine in the manga and film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind comes to terms with the toxic fungal forest that is consuming a post-apocalyptic world.
• A fascinating translation project undertaken by Professor of Spanish Francisca López, Lecturer in French Laura Balladur and others: Students in certain foreign-language courses have translated work by the poets participating in the college’s annual international poetry festival (taking place concurrently with the Open to the World events). During the festival, the student translations have been projected on a screen while the poets read them in the original language. For the second part of the course, the students translate into French and Spanish poems written by students in a poetry course taught by Senior Lecturer in English Robert Farnsworth — and all the students, translators and translated, meet to discuss the linguistic and cultural issues that are gained in translation.

Shown during the Oct. 24, 2011, student interfaith conversation are panelists Rose Levy-Rubinett ’12, Cristal Martin ’13 and Amna Ilyas ’13. Photograph by Rene Minnis.

In Austin, Texas, Rose Levy-Rubinett ’12 grew up in a household where family history and Judaism were fused into a culture shared and unquestioned, more or less, by everyone.

But at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, “I’ve had to define for myself what it means being Jewish,” she said.

If the rigorous ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ education demands that assumptions be challenged and differences explored, the breadth of faiths here affords plenty of assumptions and differences to work on. That gives students like Levy-Rubinett a means to forge whole new perspectives on their beliefs and others’.

She and six other students discussed those expanded perspectives in an interfaith conversation Monday afternoon, Oct. 24, the first day of the weeklong programming.

Aung Myint ’13 was a participant in the Oct. 24, 2011, student interfaith conversation. Photograph by Rene Minnis.

And if you ever wondered what the college’s mission statement means when it says “we engage the transformative power of our differences,” the discussion was a perfect demonstration.

Exploring the differences among faiths, the students agreed, was key to clarifying their own beliefs. This examination hasn’t shaken her faith, said junior Cristal Martin, a Christian from Wichita Falls, Texas, but it has “caused me to look deeper into what I what I believe.”

The Rev. Bill Blaine-Wallace, multifaith chaplain, welcomed about 30 students, staff and faculty to a Pettengill Hall classroom for the encounter. In lieu of a typical panel discussion (which can resemble doubles tennis but with all four players on the same side of the net), the interfaith conversation took a “reflecting team” format, designed to produce a more searching and meaningful dialogue.

The discussion began with Shachi Phene of Lexington, Mass., interviewing Shlesma Chhetri of Kathmandu, Nepal. Both are seniors and both Hindu, but from cultures half a world apart. They discussed the role of stories in their faith; dating outside the faith; and the awkwardness — the “double thinking,” in Chhetri’s words — of bringing one’s newly expanding conscious back to the old homestead.

Phillips Professor of Religious Studies Tom Tracy makes a point during the Oct. 24, 2011, student interfaith conversation as Charles A. Dana Professor of Religious Studies John Strong listens on. Photograph by Rene Minnis.

Then the other participants reflected and expanded on these themes. Along with Martin and Levy-Rubinett, they were Aung Myint ’13, a Buddhist from Yangon, Myanmar; Brett Emmons ’15, a Baha’i from Dover, Del.; and Amna Ilyas of Faisalabad, Pakistan, a Muslim.

If the transformative power of difference was a leading cause for agreement, the participants also expressed the comfort they’ve found in discovering fundamental similarities among beliefs and among people, regardless of belief.

In every religion, there will be those convinced that only the true believers — that is, themselves — will find salvation. But, said Ilyas, “meeting people [of diverse faiths] who are such great human beings, how can that ever be true?”

She said, “I don’t think God will judge people on whether they are good Muslims or good Jews — just on whether they are good people.”

“Just sitting here conversing with open receptive hearts,” Emmons added, “it’s something the world could use more of.”

Shachi Phene ’12 and Shlesma Chhetri ’12 exchange views during the Oct. 24, 2011, interfaith conversation. Photograph by Rene Minnis.

George Mitchell, whose Mitchell Institute provides scholarships to Maine students, greets ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Mitchell Scholars on Oct. 27. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

Sharing the Chapel chancel with 15 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students supported in their studies by a statewide program that he founded, former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell LL.D. ’85 used incidents from his own life to drive home higher education’s value to both personal growth and economic success.

Mitchell addressed the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ community Oct. 27 following the dedication ceremony of newly renovated Hedge and Roger Williams halls.

http://vimeo.com/31266044

“And I’m still diving,” she says.

Alyson Ewald '90 (center) and Michelle Ladonne '09 (right) listen as Daniel Bousquet '08 makes a point during the "Global Citizenship" panel discussion on Oct. 27. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

As a student, Ewald studied in Florence and London. Then she decided that she wanted a “new language with a new alphabet,” so she learned Russian during a senior year stint in the Russian city of Orel.

For much of the next decade Ewald lived in Russia, Ukraine, Hungary and Croatia, working with NGOs and activist groups. She discovered that she was “good at helping people from different countries understand each other and cooperate toward a common goal.” In 2005, she cofounded , a cooperative community located on 76 acres in northeast Missouri, where she now lives with her family.

Ewald was part of the panel discussion “Global Citizenship” during Open to the World, a series of events celebrating the dedication of Hedge and Roger Williams halls Oct. 24 through 27. With Michelle Ladonne ’09, David Miller ’08 and Daniel Bousquet ’09, she offered thoughts about becoming a citizen of the world:

• “I like to tell people that the best thing about ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ was that they gave me money to go away. This isn’t entirely true, of course, because there were many amazing things about my ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ experience. But I could never have lived and studied abroad if it hadn’t been for financial aid. My entire career depended on the loans and grants I received from ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ so that I could spend my junior year and my senior short term studying abroad.”
• “In my last month at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, I went to Russia for Short Term. That was when I planted my feet on the board and gathered all the potential that we’d been building together in order to launch into my life of working internationally. And I’m still diving.”
• “Try to get out of debt as soon as possible. If you’re out already, stay out. This allows you to be more mobile and more responsive both to the needs of the world around you and to your own inner needs.”
• “You are a precious natural resource and you are in extremely short supply. In fact, there is only one of you left. Take care of yourself. Find community to support you. Respect yourself.”
• “Pay attention to what is happening around you. Pay attention to what is happening within you. What makes your heart pound? In his poem ‘,’ ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ poet Robert Farnsworth writes about gazing at the Babson World Globe as a child, and how the sphere ‘made my insides mutter and sing.’ What makes your insides mutter and sing? Pay attention — because that is important information.”

Flags of the world hang in New Commons on United Nations Day. Photograph by Rene Minnis.

Christine Schwartz, director of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Dining Services, offers the menu for United Nations Day at the college. The special lunch kicks off “Open to the World: ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Celebrates Unbounded Learning,” a week of events celebrating the dedication of Roger Williams Hall and Hedge Hall, two historic buildings renovated in 2011 as modern academic centers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7iDnjIaTyI

Flags of the world hang in New Commons on United Nations Day. Photograph by Rene Minnis.

Christine Schwartz, director of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Dining Services, offers the menu for United Nations Day at the college.

The special lunch kicks off “Open to the World: ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Celebrates Unbounded Learning,” a week of events celebrating the dedication of Roger Williams Hall and Hedge Hall, two historic buildings renovated in 2011 as modern academic centers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUvs4-4gAeU