Frequently in his career as a �ֲ���ý professor and academic dean, Carl Benton Straub, who died Nov. 15, 2019, at age 83, delivered remarks specially crafted for �ֲ���ý celebrations, both large and small.

Erudite and eloquent, he imparted meaning and insight through well-researched metaphors, historical comparisons, and scholarly references to honor people, places, and institutional moments.

Here are six examples, including a final and more personal text about his last faculty office.

1. Thoughts on his college dictionary (2004)
2. An Appreciation of Robert Feintuch (2013)
3. Advice to seniors at the 1988 Senior-Faculty Dinner (1988)
4. Honorary degree citation for Jimmy Carter (1985)
5. Reflections on Peter John Gomes (2012)
6. “I Saw My Office Passing By” (2014)

Thoughts on his college dictionary

Straub wrote this text for �ֲ���ý Magazine in 2004 for a story about favorite items in faculty offices, later calling it “an appropriate reminder of the power of words and hence the privilege of speech.”

Voltaire and Ambrose Bierce wrote dictionaries; I merely use them. This one, which I bought my first day in college nearly 50 years ago (I remember the purchase in the Colgate bookstore), has been on my desks almost every day since.

Carl Straub’s dictionary, purchased on his first day as a Colgate undergraduate. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

It has been my silent companion. It has yielded up secrets when I thought I knew it all; it has disciplined me when I was careless. It has reminded me that my own creative powers are strangely limited by our lexical fate. No wonder Bierce called a dictionary (not his!) “a malevolent literary device.”

The book is not about a chapter in my life but rather of a theme on my journey. The theme is awareness that words are dangerous when misused because they have so much power. They put persons and things in their places, constructing situations with which we must struggle.

Words play havoc with our sensate selves, screening us from deep recesses of life, and thus seducing us into fickle and brittle pageants. My dictionary hasn’t saved me from these dangers. But its presence has kept me alert.

An Appreciation of Robert Feintuch

Written in 2013, this appreciation for Robert Feintuch, senior lecturer emeritus in art and visual culture, displays Straub’s love of the arts and deep admiration of his faculty colleagues.

I have known Robert for 37 years, ever since his initial appointment to the faculty of �ֲ���ý College.

While we may not be close in time spent together, we are close colleagues. I cherish his friendship; I relish his presence. I have three of Robert’s works, two finished in 1974 as well as one of the more recent “cloud series.”

“Legs Up” (2013), a painting from what Carl Straub calls Robert Feintuch’s “cloud series,” in polymer emulsion on honeycomb panel. Courtesy Sonnabend Gallery, New York; Miller Yezerski Gallery; Boston, and the artist.

What are two of the many dimensions of Robert’s life and journey which I most admire? First, I admire his knowledge of the history of Western art and artists, a history which informs his own work and which he uses to judge how he is doing.

He taught me, as no other artist ever has, how vital is the understanding of whence we have come to appreciate well where we are, why we see what we see, and why we celebrate beauty and truths in the forms we do.

Second, I admire his relentless commitment to and his almost flawless skills for teaching undergraduate students. He is a Master Teacher, surely a noble profession which, when joined with his art, makes him an earthen treasure lighting up our lives.

Happy birthday, dear Robert.

Advice to seniors at the 1988 Senior-Faculty Dinner

In 1988, Straub was dean of the faculty when he offered these remarks, directed at the graduating seniors, to conclude the traditional Senior-Faculty Dinner.

I want to make brief concluding remarks. They are expressions of my personal wishes for you who soon will leave this place.

I know that when you first came to college, all of you had your own high expectations of what would happen in your lives. I’m sure that one of these nights before Commencement your memory will flash back to those expectations. Some of you probably thought that college would solve all your problems. I’m sure it hasn’t done so.

You probably thought ambiguities would be overcome. Instead, I’m sure new ones have arisen. I do hope, however, that during your years here you have received three gifts, and that you will always bear these gifts and share them with others.

First, I hope you will be forever curious about the facts and truths of life. Learning helps awaken us to our enworlded condition. Knowledge begins in the astonishment that things are the way they are. Curiosity about the world around us and within us needs to share a place with curiosity about the past.

In his 1988 Senior-Faculty remarks, Carl Straub bade farewell to retiring professors, including Professor of History Ernest Muller, seen a few weeks later at Reunion. (Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library)

History is like a river. On the surface, it flows rapidly and disappears. But down below, there is a deep stream which moves more slowly, doesn’t change quickly, but is the more important because it drives the whole river. Be curious about the deep-down stream. Be proud of your curiosity.

Second, I hope you will do a little civil thinking each day. We all need to reflect upon the responsibilities of citizenship. Democracy is not a spectator sport. The easiest thing in the world is to “cop” out of the politics of power. The results can be disastrous. Our civic life needs courageous and imaginative participation by you.

I hope you who are leaving and we who are staying will live in touch with the depth of life rather than on the surface of adversarial relationships.

Third, I hope you understand and will remember the ancient meditation sounded through all generations: “Either we love one another, or the sea will engulf us and the lights will go out.” The educated person, it seems to me, has insight into the nature of human solidarity. The educated person appreciates the deepest yearning of humankind, the yearning for reconciliation and for trust.

I hope you who are leaving and we who are staying will live in touch with the depth of life rather than on the surface of adversarial relationships. That is one way to act out the privilege of being educated persons.

Members of the graduating class, I am certain all my colleagues on the faculty join me in extending to you hearty congratulations. What we wish for you is an adventure in the life of the mind, well-salted with wit and fruitful diversion, and full of surprises and discoveries about your own possibilities. Dig deep into your worlds. You will find abundant treasures.

To our honored teachers and colleagues who are retiring, we thank you most heartily. Professor Chances, Professor Gyi, Professor Hepburn, Professor Muller, Mrs. Dudman: They have been our mentors for integrity.

There is an old Russian saying, “A word is not a sparrow. Once it flies, you cannot catch it.” As teachers, your words will remain among us, while they continue to go out from this place, in sovereign flight. They will continue to beckon us toward what you have professed. To everyone here: good night.

Honorary degree citation for Jimmy Carter

In September 1985, Jimmy Carter traveled to �ֲ���ý to honor his former secretary of state, Edmund Muskie ’36, at the dedication of the Edmund S. Muskie Archives. Carter received an honorary degree during his visit, and Carl Straub wrote this citation, as he did for 111 honorands as dean of the faculty from 1974 to 1991.

President Reynolds, I am honored to present Jimmy Carter.

There is more than the Appalachian Trail which binds Maine to Georgia. There is a common heritage which rises from the simple decency of our people: we share a sense of what is good and just and beautiful. Therefore we share gratitude for the common leadership given us by Jimmy Carter. On this festive occasion when we honor a son of Maine and of �ֲ���ý, we pause to thank this son of Georgia.

His journey has been one of human adventure.

Jimmy Carter was Georgia’s 76th governor and America’s 39th president. His personal sojourn and public record are common knowledge: farmer and businessman, naval officer and nuclear engineer, public educator and church teacher, political leader and planning commissioner, house builder and fly fisherman.

His journey has been one of human adventure. When he reached his highest office, he did not forget the lessons from that journey, for they taught him what is important to the American people.

Former President Jimmy Carter hugs Edmund Muskie ’36 during ceremonies dedicating the Muskie Archives at �ֲ���ý College on Sept. 28, 1985. Muskie served under Carter as U.S. secretary of state. (Frank Siteman)

And so his presidency was marked by firm commitment to human rights throughout the world. It was marked by foresight to protect our natural environments, to preserve American wilderness. It was marked by courage to negotiate, with Panama, with Egypt and Israel, with China, with the Soviet Union.

For his grace in the use of power to bear down the haughty and lift up the downtrodden, and for his quiet example that wisdom and love bring reconciliation on this globe given to light and shadow, I present Jimmy Carter for the degree Doctor of Laws.

Reflections on Peter John Gomes

On Oct. 25, 2012, Straub spoke at the renaming of the �ֲ���ý Chapel in memory of the Rev. Peter Gomes ’65.

The young John Keats is remembered by his own words, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Today we gather to write Peter’s name in stone. The walls which frame us, the turrets which anchor our conclave, quarried near Hingham, Mass., a century ago, give place for our remembering and for Peter’s name.

It is right that we do so. In a Feb. 4, 1977, letter to the venerable dean Harry Rowe, Class of 1912, Peter wrote, “Hardly a day goes by when I do not have reason to bless the God of Heaven for my years at �ֲ���ý.” Peter never wavered in his gratitude.

From his early years, Peter was smitten with words. Over time he became their connoisseur.

He relished this college. He cherished this chapel. Much of his undergraduate life was woven into this place. He sang in the choir and at times was choirmaster. He played the organ. In his senior year he helped liberate chapel services from a century of mandated student attendance.

As student and alumnus, he preached and lectured here for nearly half a century. In the last return he climbed haltingly up to this pulpit. For Peter, the college chapel was where, to borrow Wendell Berry’s fine words, “all is unentangled and all is undismayed.”

The Rev. Peter Gomes ’65 sings during the Alumni Memorial Service at Reunion 2010. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

What simple stories can I tell about our complex friend that might expand the narrative of continuity in his life? Three come to mind; two are his own.

Peter tells of a conversation with Benjamin Elijah Mays, Class of 1920. The then-elderly statesman said, “As a boy I preached to the crows and the cows. But the best of speaking I learned at �ֲ���ý.” Peter replied, “I did too, sir.”

From his early years, Peter was smitten with words. Over time he became their connoisseur. He respected their power to break the silence, sometimes for the good. Throughout his life he practiced their magical syllables. Peter acknowledged that at �ֲ���ý good speech depended on overcoming the facile thinking and faulty logic of youth.

He attributed his rhetorical confidence and agility to the craggy Yankee professor of speech Brooks Quimby. Peter met Quimby in his first week of college classes and always called him his “spiritual mentor.”

Peter said that these early experiences provided him with “a certain measure of moral security” for the later challenges.

A second story is also Peter’s. Toward the end of his study here the administration proposed a radical change in the academic calendar. Faculty and students were strongly opposed. As was the custom, a debate was scheduled to clarify the issues. In what he called a moment of “perversity,” Peter chose to enter the debate and argue for the change. Well, the judges ruled Peter’s side had — won.

He later recalled the event: “I chose to take the losing side in popular opinion, and won. That appealed to me almost more than anything else.” At �ֲ���ý and during two years at Tuskegee, he often advocated unpopular alternatives in campus controversies — and prevailed. Peter said that these early experiences provided him with “a certain measure of moral security” for the later challenges.

Carl Straub speaks during the service for naming the Peter J. Gomes Chapel on Oct. 25, 2012. (Mike Bradley/�ֲ���ý College)

Finally, a story of collected moments. In a 1987 �ֲ���ý interview, the Plummer Professor acknowledged that while he was not “a rank heathen” in college, he shared “the cynicism of an undergraduate who had disproved the existence of God.” Irreverence joined his mischief. When employed as Sunday organist for a local Episcopal church, Peter liked to play as preludes rather snappy renditions of “Lady of Spain.”

On his journey, Peter said what he said, did what he did, hoped what he hoped, out of the audacious and confounding freedom of a Christian man.

On campus, he worked to break down remnants of an earlier residential culture intended for piety. As president of the campus-wide service organization, he single-handedly changed its long-held name “Christian Association” to “Campus Association.” While Peter was partisan of institutional origins, he also had hearty — and targeted — disdain for what he once called, during his trustee years, “sunshine traditions.”

On his journey, Peter said what he said, did what he did, hoped what he hoped, out of the audacious and confounding freedom of a Christian man. But the pilgrimage itself, the circumstances of living, disciplined his faith and toughened his fortitude. The gift of freedom came to bestow the duty of caring for his fellows.

I return to stone and water. Today we are drawn to stone, not water, to mediate our memories, to mark our gratitude, to chisel into permanence the transitoriness of our kind. The slave spiritual insists there is always, always one more river to cross; we have chosen stone in effort to bridge the flow.

Lest we forget, however, in the midst of our celebration: Keats, the arts and the sciences, render tentative our choice. For Yeats, who read here 80 years ago, the waves may wash away even the stars. The poet Elizabeth Bishop notes water as the transmutation of fire which feeds on stone. The lineaments of Delphi are burning.

In the time beyond our histories, then, the templed rock of Plymouth may crack into the incorrigible sea. The brick may be carried down the Charles to join sediment in the harbor. These walls may be broken by rain and tumble through the rapids to Merrymeeting Bay.

Peter knew all this. He knew of the firmament and of the flood. But in his generous mischievousness, he would have allowed us this day, and he would have joined in our song. So let us rejoice within and because of the bounty of our lives. Let us rejoice and be exceedingly glad for dear Peter’s life — for his life among us, for his life in this place.

Amen.

“I Saw My Office Passing By”

This is a different kind of writing, one displaying his sardonic wit — this time in service of a poignant theme. Straub wrote this reflection in August 2014 during the demolition of his final office, located at 75 Campus Ave., razed to make way for two new residence halls.

The other day my car was stopped while a large truck came out from the crushed space behind the shabby screens trying to announce “progress” for the neighborhood. At first I was mildly annoyed. But soon I recognized it was my office passing by. It was not easily recognizable.

After all, I left it nine years ago, chased out by a policy which states, “retire, vacate.” Nothing organic about departments; it’s all a matter of contracts. Nothing lingering about high learning; the end of sharing is quick and efficient.

Carl Straub saw symbolism in the razing of the building at 75 Campus Ave., where he had his last office as a member of the religion faculty, in August 2014 to make way for new residence halls. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

So perhaps I only surmised it was my office. But I was glad I could wait in silence while the truck load rocked over the curb with my friends’ offices also.

It was my last office in the college. It was my seventh. The first was the tiny one to the left of the Parker-side door into Hathorn. There were two more in Hathorn, near dear Joe D’Alfonso. Then there were two on the ground floor of Parker, near Charles Niehaus and John Cole. There was the interlude office on the third floor of Lane. It was in that office that I first encountered a few who became treasured friends.

That happy band in the dilapidated old apartment house all savored their common place.

I remember my last office, the one which I’m certain passes me by, when it was a room in Margaret Brearley’s apartment. Margaret was an assistant professor of German who died early in her career. Alas, I cannot remember the year I moved into the last office. Was it 1991? All I know is that I was happy there. I was surrounded by my favorite colleagues. I was meeting with wonderful and sometimes recalcitrant students in both religious studies and environmental studies, for a magical opportunity.

It was my place where I had moments to reflect on both the college faculty who spoke to me on campus because I left the dean’s office, and those who no longer spoke to me because I had changed offices!

I savored this last office. Indeed, that happy band in the dilapidated old apartment house all savored their common place. Before the diaspora into Fancy Hedge, before the cosmic murmur of the fancy split into philosophy and religious studies, before “progress” moved John’s crooked-hanging prints to other walls, before memories became so important to me, I worked in my last office with contentment.

I didn’t mind that eventually Okrent and Strong had more sun, or that Cummiskey and Tracy had more space. Eventually I was grateful that Bruce remained to help heal the loss of Kolb and Allison.

Now the rubble is nearly flat to the earth. Soon again some of my friends will return to their offices. But mine is gone. It passed by while I waited.

They edited The �ֲ���ý Student and led the debate team. They taught, discovered, wrote, organized, and advocated. They spoke out against racism at home and discrimination and secrecy around the world.

During Black History Month, we shared on �ֲ���ý social media channels the stories of six African American alumni from �ֲ���ý’ past — famous firsts, national leaders, and unsung figures whose lives and legacies, of course, reverberate beyond February.

Henry Chandler, Class of 1874

The college’s first African American students were recruited personally by �ֲ���ý founder Oren B. Cheney, including Henry W. Chandler of Bath, Maine, the college’s first African American graduate, in 1874.

After college, he earned a law degree from Howard University, then practiced law in Florida; he also edited The Ocala Republican and The Plain Dealer newspapers. In 1880, Chandler was elected to the Florida state senate and held office for two terms.

Stella James, Class of 1897

In 1897, Stella James became the first African American woman to graduate from �ֲ���ý.

Born in Washington, D.C., she graduated from the historically black Storer School (later Storer College), an institution founded with the help of �ֲ���ý founder Oren Cheney.

At �ֲ���ý, she wrote for the school newspaper and, at graduation, earned second honor in physics (students did not major in subjects as we know it today).

After her graduation, she taught science and physics at Storer, Virginia Seminary, and Bluefield State College. She was a member of the National Society for Black Physicists.

Benjamin Mays, Class of 1920

A giant of the civil rights movement in the U.S., Benjamin E. Mays was known as “the schoolmaster of the movement” for teaching and inspiring a generation of civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., who called Mays “my spiritual mentor and my intellectual father.”

Mays delivered King’s final eulogy on April 9, 1968.

Mays’ statement that �ֲ���ý  made it “possible for me to emancipate myself, to accept with dignity my own worth as a free man,” was incorporated into the �ֲ���ý mission statement.

In November 2017, his hometown community in Greenwood County, S.C., erected a statue of Mays.

John Davis, Class of 1926

Journalist, intellectual, and political organizer John Preston Davis made his name in the Harlem Renaissance and emerged as a powerful voice challenging racist federal programs during the Depression.

At �ֲ���ý, he was a formidable debater, yet was denied membership in Delta Sigma Rho, a national honorary debating fraternity, because he was black. �ֲ���ý fought this racist policy but was unsuccessful until DSR changed its exclusionary policy years later.

After graduation, Davis succeeded W.E.B. Du Bois as the literary editor of The Crisis. Working with such Harlem Renaissance authors as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, among others, he produced Fire!!, a magazine devoted to young African American artists.

He earned a law degree from Harvard, and in 1935 co-founded the influential National Negro Congress, a major civil rights coalition that was active in the late 1930s and 1940s. Under Davis, the NNC exposed “prejudicial assumptions that underlay many of the ostensibly liberal New Deal reforms,” according to �ֲ���ý history professor Hilmar Jensen.

Davis’ work with NNC “directly inspired” the next generation of civil rights leaders to found organizations such as the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

William Worthy, Class of 1942

William Worthy ’42 was a fearless, globetrotting journalist who spent a career telling Americans “what’s going on in the world in their name.”

He reported from some of the hardest places for Americans to get to during the Cold War, including the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, as well as from post-revolutionary Iran, all the while being hounded by the U.S. State Department, the FBI, and the CIA, who tried to stop his reporting; he was also red-baited in the U.S. Senate.

In fact, a legal battle involving Worthy’s trip to Cuba inspired “The Ballad of William Worthy,” by folk singer Phil Ochs.

At his death, said that Worthy was a “reporter drawn to forbidden datelines.”

Peter Gomes, Class of 1965

In 1991, the Rev. Peter J. Gomes ’65 took to the steps of Widener Library at Harvard to declare that he was “a Christian who happens as well to be gay,” an act of coming-out in response to gay bashing on campus.

A prominent national figure considered one of America’s greatest preachers, Gomes was Harvard’s Pusey Minister of Memorial Church and, during the last 20 years of his life, a prolific author and religious voice who advocated for a more inclusive interpretation of the Bible.

Gomes died in 2011; Harvard president Drew Faust said Gomes was “a living symbol of courage and conviction.”

In 2012, �ֲ���ý named the college chapel in Gomes’ memory.

Illustration by David Wilgus and Mervil Paylor

After Harvard Yard was closed to the public during the 2011 Occupy Harvard movement, a graduate student complained that “we don’t want our university to be a gated community.”

Yet the traditional college quadrangle resembles exactly that. Enclosed on four sides, a quad’s buildings face inward and there are gates galore. “And when you create a ceremonial portal like a gate, you’re telling visitors that they are entering another world,” says Philip Isaacson ’47, architectural critic and author.

�ֲ���ý, however, adopted a different model, placing its first two buildings, Hathorn Hall and Parker Hall, side by side atop a sloping plot of land in 1857. Bold and simple, the arrangement was considered “very distinguished,” Isaacson says. Still, early �ֲ���ý leaders “hadn’t made up their mind how they would handle future buildings.”

Which brings us to the intriguing decision, a century ago, about where the college would place its new chapel.

When �ֲ���ý created its Chapel, now named for Peter Gomes ’65, the college trustees voted that the space in front of the Chapel would remain open and free from any other structure in perpetuity, “unless it be a monument, shaft, arch or similar construction.”

Dedicated in 1914, the Chapel is now named in memory of Peter J. Gomes ’65, the influential and beloved preacher, minister, professor and author.

The naming was celebrated at a service in the Chapel on Oct. 25, a day before the installation of Clayton Spencer as president. Among the speakers was Carl Benton Straub, professor emeritus of religion and the Clark A. Griffith Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies, who began his reflection with the sentence that Keats asked be chiseled on his tombstone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

With the naming of the Chapel, Straub said, Gomes’ name is now written in stone. Specifically, the stone is seam-faced granite, quarried a century ago near Hingham, Mass., and carrying a distinctive and natural tone and texture. “The walls which frame us, the turrets which anchor our conclave…give place for our remembering and for Peter’s name,” Straub said.

With its founding in 1855, the founders of �ֲ���ý registered their protest against “castes, classes and social tyrannies,” in the words of George Colby Chase, the college’s second president. Befitting this iconoclasm, our own Historic Quad evolved less like the quads at places like Harvard, Bowdoin or Dartmouth. The layout is more open, like a city park, Isaacson suggests.

The chapel’s location is less an ecumenical gesture and more a “nod to the openness of the college to the community.”

As Oren Cheney’s chief lieutenant and then as president, Chase was, for many years, under chronic pressure to raise money for the latest college needs. By around 1910, money from Andrew Carnegie for a new science hall was in hand, so Chase was trying to raise money for a new chapel and new gym.

In January 1911, the pressure on Chase ramped up after the college received a $1,000 challenge gift that required �ֲ���ý to raise another $3,000 — in three days — or forfeit the original $1,000.

So Chase, as he’d done many times before, took the train to New York City to meet with prospective donors. By his third day, he’d raised just $2,000. Two hours before his train was to leave, he received a message at his hotel inviting him to call on a donor — within 15 minutes.

He made the visit, secured $5,000 to meet and exceed the challenge, and then received another $60,000 a year later from the same donor, later revealed to be Ellen S. James, widow of industrialist and philanthropist Daniel Willis James.

“So, what’s the guy going to do?”

By the time money was in hand for the chapel, the east side of the Quad was filled with Coram Library (1902) and the forthcoming Carnegie Science (1913). So a location on College Street was selected. A likely challenge, Isaacson says, was how to orient the new building in that spot.

“So along comes Chase with a chapel,” muses Isaacson. “If he tries to have it face inward toward the park, its length is going to obscure Parker Hall. If you have it face Parker, then its back end is going to face the town, which isn’t going to look good, either. So, what’s the guy going to do?”

The solution was to place the Chapel parallel to College Street, with its porch facing Campus Avenue and the city of Lewiston beyond.

That this orientation has worked so well can be explained by Straub, who did research about the Chapel in the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library over the summer, both for his remarks at the service and for an historical essay published in a brochure about the Chapel.

Straub found that in June 1912, months before the laying of the cornerstone that November, the Board of Trustees voted to keep the space in front of their future Chapel open and free from any other structure, “unless it be a monument, shaft, arch or similar construction,” in perpetuity.

The decision acknowledged the simple fact that where buildings �������’t is as significant as where they are; in practice, it ensured that anyone coming up College Street from the city of Lewiston would have an unobstructed view of the Chapel.

Long ago, the college decided that no building would occupy space in front of the Gomes Chapel.

For �ֲ���ý, a welcoming approach to the college was important. Barely a half-century old by then, �ֲ���ý was still well-aware that it owed its existence to Lewiston’s industrialists — including namesake Benjamin �ֲ���ý — the leading citizens who had donated the land for Oren Cheney’s new college back in 1855. Blocking the approach from town with buildings would be like “saying to the city, ‘Keep out,’” Isaacson says.

That the Chapel is the college building that welcomes town to gown is less a religious and ecumenical gesture, Straub says, and more a “nod to the openness of the college to the community, an acknowledgment of interdependence and of appropriate appreciation.”

At the Chapel dedication in 1914, architect J. Randolph Coolidge noted the importance of allowing the Chapel to say something graceful to the Lewiston community. “With [the Chapel’s] setting of over-arching trees, its wide porches, its easy approaches, it extends an invitation and a welcome to the college and to the city.”

That invitation still stands today. The Gomes Chapel is as “distinctive and impressive it was when it was built,” Isaacson says, and still does a splendid job of tying the college to its larger community and its original roots.

A century ago, he adds, “�ֲ���ý College did the right thing.”

More about the Chapel
The recently published brochure Peter J. Gomes Chapel: Common Ground for Uncommon Pursuits, written by Carl Benton Straub, professor emeritus of religion and Clark A. Griffith Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies, offers historical and contemporary perspectives on the Chapel and its role in the cultural and religious life of the college.

For a copy, please contact the �ֲ���ý College Multifaith Chaplaincy at 163 Wood St., Lewiston ME 04240, or email lthomps2@bates.edu.

�ֲ���ý President Clayton Spencer delivered her inaugural address, “Questions Worth Asking,” on Oct. 26, 2012. Click this link for a PDF version of the address.

Well, I guess now I really am the eighth president of �ֲ���ý College. It is an enormous honor and a humbling trust. Thank you Mike, Marcus, Umar, Lynn, and Danny for making it official.

And thank you, Drew, for those amazingly generous words. It means the world to me that you are here.

Thank you Jacqui, Michael, Pat, Jennifer, mayors Macdonald and LaBonté, and Adam for your greetings from many quarters.

�ֲ���ý is privileged to be part of a community with a rich history and increasingly vibrant present, and I have felt at home here from the moment the moving trucks pulled up at 256 College St. this past summer. We and our host cities draw strength from a partnership of genuine mutuality. Give us a little time, and I’m pretty sure that it is our West Coast counterpart that will be known as the “other LA.”

I am also honored to be joined today by my three predecessors — Don Harward, Elaine Hansen, and Nancy Cable. Their presence marks the fact that this ceremony is not about any given individual, but rather about the institution — its history, its values, and the mission we carry into the future. Anything we are able to accomplish in the coming years will build on the contributions you made to the fabric of this campus and college. Thank you for your leadership, and thank you for being here today.

I want to welcome and thank, as well, presidents and delegates from our sister institutions in Maine, and from colleges and universities across New England, the nation, and even the Atlantic. Your presence honors �ֲ���ý, and we appreciate your solidarity and support at this moment of great meaning for us.

Thank you students, faculty, and staff, who are the heart and soul of this remarkable campus community. Here, I want to give special thanks to the many individuals who have knocked themselves out planning these festivities and tackling every detail so that we would all feel welcomed and well taken care of.

Thank you, as well, trustees, former trustees, and alumni — those of you present here and those of you participating at a distance. You serve and support the college in so many ways, and we are deeply grateful.

I want to give a special thanks to my friends and family who have turned up in force — my children, my parents, my brother and sister, my phalanx of relatives, and friends and colleagues from so many chapters of my life. It is such a joy to share this moment with all of you.

It is a special honor for me to wear, on this occasion, the cap that my father wore throughout his academic career, including 26 years as president of two different liberal arts colleges. It is an understatement to say that my parents have made a heroic effort to travel up here to be with us today. It is characteristic of their generosity and their spirit, and I appreciate beyond measure that they are here.

• • •

It is an uncommon privilege to be invited to step into the history of an institution. And it is a daunting responsibility to be asked to point the way into an inevitably uncertain future.

It is worth remembering, as we try our best to look ahead and make out the shape of things to come, that our predictions are always defined more by the past we have lived than by the future we imagine. Who among us in the early 1990s would have guessed at the profound reshaping of contemporary life about to be ushered in by the Internet? And who, on September 10, 2001, would have predicted a decade defined by a “War on Terror,” U.S. involvement in two literal wars, and a fundamental recasting of America’s place in the world?

When George Colby Chase was installed as the second president of �ֲ���ý, he described “a society so complex that its numberless and every-varying elements with their incessant action and reaction, dizzy the clearest brain and baffle the subtlest power of analysis….”[1] That was 1894.

In 1920, on the heels of World War I — the so-called war to end all wars — our third president, Clifton Daggett Gray, spoke of the future with foreboding: “This generation has only to look at what is going on under its very eyes to realize that there is taking place in both hemispheres something, the full significance of which no one is wise enough at present to estimate, but which is bound to affect for good or ill the destinies of the whole world for centuries to come.”[2] Little did President Gray know that the Great Depression and World War II would come along during his tenure to confirm his worst fears.

In 1967, as the civil rights movement shook the nation, Detroit burned, and campuses were torn apart by the Vietnam War, Thomas Hedley Reynolds, our fifth president, noted the “remarkable rapidity of change in this country in the last half century,” and worried about the “many dangers” confronting “this college and … others of its kind.”[3]

Of course, at that moment, Reynolds, and �ֲ���ý College, stood on the threshold of one of the most stable and prosperous half-centuries in human history — a period that we may well look back on as the golden age of higher education in America.

We can never know what the future has in store for us. The best we can do is to engage the present and make our way forward with energy, diligence, and authenticity.

• • •

�ֲ���ý brings to this task a strong history. We are proud of our story of origin, and we tell it often. �ֲ���ý was established in 1855 by Freewill Baptists, who were also abolitionists. We were coed from the beginning; we recruited freed slaves to come here after the Civil War; and we never had fraternities or sororities because they ran against our egalitarian grain. This is a good story, but like any story that we tell over and over, I worry that we may no longer hear its meaning. So I thought today I would share a slightly different story — one that is familiar in its broad outlines, but revealing to me, and I hope to you, in its particulars.

As most of you probably know, one of our most distinguished graduates is Benjamin Elijah Mays, an American preacher, educator, scholar, and civil rights leader, who was president of Morehouse College in Atlanta from 1940 to 1967. Influenced by Mahatma Gandhi, he was an important mentor to Martin Luther King Jr., and an advisor to U.S. presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

The youngest of eight children, Mays was born in 1894 to tenant farmers, and he grew up outside of Ninety-Six, South Carolina, in a county notorious for racial extremism.[4] In 1917, he came to �ֲ���ý as a sophomore, at age 23, after cobbling together a high school education against all odds. You see, black children in Greenwood County were allowed to attend school for only four months a year — November through February. The rest of the time they were expected to be available for farm work.

Within his first eight weeks at �ֲ���ý, Mays won the Sophomore Declamation Prize, and he was then recruited to join the college’s storied debate team. He graduated in 1920, one of fifteen students awarded honors, and he was chosen by his peers to be the class day speaker. Later, Mays went on to the University of Chicago, where he earned his master’s and Ph.D.

In his autobiography, written when he was in his seventies, Mays recounts the following story: “At �ֲ���ý, teachers spoke to Negro students on campus and downtown, especially if the Negro student was in a professor’s class. I knew one or two professors at the University of Chicago in 1921 who never recognized a Negro student when off campus or on.”[5]

Not all of Mays’ experiences at �ֲ���ý were positive. He was “furious” when he was not chosen to participate in either of the intercollegiate debates his junior year — against Cornell and Harvard — despite being one of the top debaters on the team,[6] and he nearly froze his fingers and toes off while clearing snow at President Chase’s house on Christmas Day when it was forty-four below zero.[7] But Mays counted his disappointments and challenges “as nothing compared to the rich harvest I gleaned from my association with the �ֲ���ý faculty and students.”[8]

�ֲ���ý admitted black students, educated women along with men, and banned exclusive social clubs not because it was the politically correct thing to do. Quite the contrary, these policies were seriously politically incorrect in their time. Rather, as the story of Benjamin Mays makes clear, we did it because, somehow, from our very beginnings, we encountered individuals in their full humanity. We took as our task educating them with intellectual rigor, ethical responsibility, and care for their fellow human beings.

These qualities are in the DNA of �ֲ���ý College, and they define us to this day. They also point the way forward.

• • •

Last month, Rafael Reif was installed as the 17th president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He spoke about our changing world and the implications for higher education. According to Reif, we find ourselves now on the threshold of a “technological transformation [that] has the potential to reshape the education landscape — and to challenge our very existence.”[9]

�ֲ���ý is not MIT. And it is not our first impulse to frame our future in terms of changes in technology. Yet the technology Reif is talking about is more than a tool, it is a cultural force changing the way we live our lives and experience the world. It is reshaping our professional interactions, transforming the nature and structure of social relations, and altering our connection to information and knowledge.

Some believe that the Internet will follow radio and television, bringing broad social change while leaving institutions like ours more or less unperturbed. Others point to the printing press, which made knowledge available to the masses, leading, inexorably, to the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the modern West. One thing is certain: the context in which we do what we do in higher education has changed irrevocably.

This is partly because these forces hit us where we live in higher education — some of the most powerful changes are occurring at the heart of scholarship and knowledge creation. And it is partly because the changes happening around us have altered the frame through which our particular model of education is viewed.

In science, for example, online depositories allow scholarly exchange to short-circuit traditional peer review, challenging the role of scholarly journals. The Public Library of Science — PLOS — publishes open-access online journals that, in less than a decade, are among the most highly cited in biology, genetics, and medicine.[10]

Rich archives, once available only in person, are being put online. The Library of Congress has digitized historic newspapers, classic prints and photographs, as well as the correspondence of figures ranging from Alexander Graham Bell and Abraham Lincoln to Frederick Douglass and Hannah Arendt.[11] The Google Art Project has brought online over 32,000 works by 7,200 artists, housed in 156 collections around the world.[12] One can explore these paintings in remarkable detail — down to the individual brushstroke.

These breakthroughs in technology present tremendous opportunities for places like �ֲ���ý. No longer does a senior writing a history thesis have to travel to Boston to find materials or wait three weeks to get primary sources through interlibrary loan. Language students can hone their conversational style by watching foreign-language soap operas whenever it suits them on any one of their mobile devices. And our “Presidential Campaign Rhetoric” class can pore over Clinton’s convention speech, as written and as delivered. For institutions, as for individuals, the world is quite literally a click away.

In their intellectual reach, then, �ֲ���ý, and liberal arts colleges like us, have become a great deal larger. Yet enlarging the screen on which we must project our institutional identity and compete for faculty and students makes this tiny campus in Lewiston, Maine, look ever smaller. The liberal arts colleges, taken together, educate fewer than four percent of the college students in America.[13] That fraction shrinks further against a large and growing global denominator.

Beyond sheer numbers, what Hedley Reynolds described as the “tough-minded tradition of the small New England college”[14] is at risk of looking dangerously quaint in a world of rapidly growing global populations, hungry for knowledge and credentials. Furthermore, the expansion of knowledge and fields of research renders increasingly arbitrary our choices about the faculty we hire and the courses we teach.

Finally, ready access to the world’s most enticing intellectual capital at little or no cost makes the residential model of the liberal arts feel ever more expensive. With Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and other leading universities putting highly produced courses online — often in fields we don’t even teach — we can be sure that students and their parents will scrutinize intensely the value proposition of the residential liberal arts model.

• • •

We welcome this scrutiny because it forces us to get very clear about who we are and what we do. It challenges us to make a virtue of our scale, delivering our particular model of education at a high standard of excellence. What is this model? It is the compelling paradox of the liberal arts, where we value the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, with no practical aim, and at the same time prize the teaching of values — of curiosity and empathy, imagination and confidence  — that shape a human being who can in turn shape the world. It is reaching up in pursuit of truth and reaching out in acts of service, and seeing no contradiction between the two.

Here I would like to return to the story of Benjamin Mays and suggest three lessons that it offers to the �ֲ���ý of today.

First, the story of Benjamin Mays is a story about “mindset.” It is the story of a college that met the world head on from its very beginnings. Bucking history, convention, and the easy path, �ֲ���ý engaged with a very complex social reality and pressed ahead based on a simple conviction — namely, that all human beings have free and equal access to God’s grace, and, by extension, to education and human fulfillment.[15]

This mindset — standing firmly on principle and encountering the world with energy and confidence — is highly relevant today. If success for colleges and universities was defined for the past thirty years as a niche competition based on wealth and prestige, in the next decades success will go to the institutions that engage most robustly and effectively with the forces that are reshaping our world.

It is not enough, in the liberal arts, to circle the wagons and assume that we can keep doing what we’re doing, the way we’ve always been doing it. In a world of exploding knowledge, we need to be highly intentional about how we recruit new faculty and how we configure departments to build on our particular strengths. We need to move beyond the limits of disciplinary structures to shape intellectual capacity and curriculum in ways that respond to the evolution of fields and student curiosity, while at the same time maintaining our standards of excellence. And we need to think pragmatically about how to support faculty members who wish to adapt their pedagogy to take greater advantage of the powerful tools that are now available.

With technology turning the world into our library, we must also work with faculty and students to gain access to the range of content and modes of intellectual production that are now at our fingertips. At the same time, the central goal of liberal education — “to nurture the growth of human talent in the service of human freedom,” as historian William Cronon puts it[16] — has never been more important. Given all that our students have coming at them — in the classroom, in their lives, and on their machines — they sorely need adults whom they know and respect to work with them as they learn to navigate complicated intellectual terrain.

The good class is not simply the “small” class, but rather the “engaged” class. Here, faculty, through their own passion and erudition, inspire students to take ideas seriously, and sometimes even to love them. They help students when the work gets hard — when texts resist interpretation, or require more context than an eighteen-year-old could possibly bring; when experiments fail in the lab; or when weeks of analysis must be scrubbed because of an error in a data set. Working closely with adults and with each other, students learn that although information may be a click away, mastery and meaning are not. Some kinds of knowledge require patience, and perseverance, and close attention.

This is what South African artist William Kentridge calls “getting our hands dirty.” Last spring, Kentridge gave the Norton Lectures at Harvard, and I was privileged to attend all six of them.[17] He titled the series, “Drawing Lessons,” and each week he invited us into his studio — through films, drawings, and reflections — and showed us how the studio is for him the place where he makes sense of the world. For Kentridge, meaning emerges from making. The making of the object is not a one-way translation of an idea into a visual object. Rather, the process of construction is where meaning materializes. From the act of encountering the world and rendering some aspect of it in physical form, we can then look at the object in front of us, and parts of the world and ourselves are revealed.

College, like the studio, is quintessentially a place of making — making sense of ourselves and making sense of our world. In this respect, the liberal arts college, with its intimate scale, has a distinct advantage. And �ֲ���ý has a strong tradition of active, engaged learning to build on. All of our students write senior theses or develop capstone projects, working intensively with a faculty member one-on-one over a period of months. A third of our students work in the local community through their courses or the Harward Center for Community Partnerships. Our General Education Concentrations embrace problem-oriented and interdisciplinary approaches. And over sixty per cent of our students spend some portion of their undergraduate time abroad, quite literally engaged with the world.

In short, the mindset exemplified in the Benjamin Mays story is grounded in ideas and values, but porous to the world. For the liberal arts college it means, among other things, recognizing that the line between theory and practice is breaking down. It means acknowledging that our students’ work with Somali children and adults in Lewiston is not only an opportunity for service, but also a venue for cultural learning at a very high level. And it means that we see the growing concern of students and parents with employment prospects not as a domain beneath our proper notice, but rather as a deep aspect of our obligation as a liberal arts college to prepare our students for a life of purposeful work. At our best, we challenge ourselves as an institution to wrestle actively and joyously with the world as we encounter it. In so doing we model this mindset for our students as they work to construct their own lives.

Second, the story of Benjamin Mays is a human story. It is as much about “heart” as “head.” It illustrates the most distinctive and important dimension of our work at liberal arts colleges — the project of guiding young people through the passage from childhood to adulthood, to make them not only knowledgeable and equipped to navigate a complex world, but also motivated with empathy toward their fellow human beings. As Peter Gomes — another of our notable graduates — once said, we put “the making of a better person ahead of the making of a brighter person, or a better mousetrap.”[18]

This “making of a better person” is an important project, and one that liberal arts colleges are positioned to carry out better than any other higher education model — and certainly better than any machine. To paraphrase a recent Boston Globe headline, “There’s no app for answering deep questions.”[19] Questions, again in the words of Peter Gomes, like “What is my purpose? How can my life be better? How can I help to make a better world?” Gomes continues, “These are the questions worth asking, and college is one of the few places that allows you, even requires you, to do so.”[20]

It is not our job to supply the answers to these questions, but it is our job to create the conditions under which our students will be inspired to ask them for themselves. Learning here occurs in community. We are situated in a particular place, with a particular culture, and a particular set of human beings who come to know each other face to face. Just as all great novels are parochial novels,[21] so the most complete kind of human learning takes place in community, with the solidarity of companionship and the challenge of truth.

The liberal arts college embodies a powerful alchemy of the universal and the particular. The audacity of the intellectual project — to encompass knowledge across time and the world — invites our students to grapple with fundamental principles even as they hone their individuality. At the same time, our intimate scale creates a zone of care and concern that — when it works — produces graduates with ethical awareness and a commitment to serving purposes larger than themselves.

Finally, the story of Benjamin Mays is, at the most literal level, a story about community — not only what community is for, but how it is constructed. It is a story of openness and inclusion, well before we had the language for such things.

The genius of American higher education is that it unites excellence and opportunity at the heart of the enterprise, allowing talented students regardless of background or means to attend our best colleges and universities, and, conversely, allowing these institutions to draw from broad pools of talent that are constantly being renewed. This is a historical accident brought to us by the G.I. Bill following World War II and codified in the Federal Higher Education Act of 1965.[22]

Far from turning American colleges and universities into “hobo jungles,”[23] as predicted in 1944 by University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins, the returning GIs infused our institutions with talent, energy, aspiration, and grit, producing a higher education system of unmatched vitality and intellectual power. In other words, American higher education is excellent not in spite of its openness, but because of it.

At �ֲ���ý, we claim this union of excellence and opportunity as a core element of our identity, and we need to continue to build on this deep aspect of who we are. As a practical matter this means redoubling our efforts to recruit students from a wide range of backgrounds, and it means maintaining an unwavering commitment to financial aid. A residential liberal arts education is expensive for us to offer and for families to afford. Unless we are content to become a luxury good — higher education’s version of the “gated community” — we must make sure that we have the financial means to seek out and admit talented students regardless of their ability to pay.

And we must make equally sure that, once here, our students encounter a diverse range of adults ready to support them for success, and a culture that embraces diversity across many dimensions, giving richness and power to the educational experience of all of our students.

• • •

It is no accident that one of the great technologists of our era, Steve Jobs, titled his commencement address at Stanford in 2005, “You’ve Got to Find What You Love.”[24] He told three stories — one called “Connecting the Dots”; one called “Love and Loss”; and one called “Death.” In this last story, in which he described being diagnosed with cancer and then apparently “cured,” Jobs delivered a simple message to the assembled students: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

Likewise, at �ֲ���ý, we don’t have time to waste. In certain respects, we lag our peers in wealth and fame and market position. But we are not in danger of living someone else’s life. We know who we are and what we stand for, and we stand ready — together — to challenge ourselves and to engage the world.

Thank you.

This inaugural address by �ֲ���ý President Clayton Spencer, “Questions Worth Asking,” was delivered on Oct. 26, 2012.

Endnotes

1. George Colby Chase, �ֲ���ý College — Inaugural Address of President George C. Chase, September 22, 1894, p. 8.
2. Clifton Daggett Gray, “Inaugural Address,” �ֲ���ý College Bulletin, Vol. 18, No. 1 (December 1920), p. 35.
3. Thomas Hedley Reynolds, “The Inaugural Address by Dr. Thomas Hedley Reynolds,” news release, October 7, 1967, pp. 4 and 8.
4. Benjamin E. Mays, Born to Rebel: An Autobiography. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987 (c. 1971), p. xliv.
5. Mays, p. 65.
6. Mays, pp. 58-59.
7. Mays, p. 54.
8. Mays, p. 60.
9. L. Rafael Reif, Inaugural Address, Office of the President, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, September, 21, 2012, .
10. Thomson Reuters,
11. Library of Congress,
12. Google Art Project,
13. See Helen L. Horowitz, “Balancing Hopes and Limits in the Liberal Arts College,” Liberal Arts Colleges in American Higher Education: Challenges and Opportunities, American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper No. 59 (2005), p. 18, retrieved from
14. Reynolds Inaugural Address, p. 1.
15. Alfred Williams Anthony, �ֲ���ý College and Its Background: A Review of Origins and Causes. Philadelphia: Judson Press, 1936, pp. 81-82. See also, Charles E. Clark, �ֲ���ý Through the Years: An Illustrated History. Lewiston, ME: �ֲ���ý College, 2005, p. 20.
16. William Cronon, “‘Only Connect…’: The Goals of a Liberal Education,” The American Scholar, Volume 67, No. 4 (Autumn 1998), retrieved from .
17. See .
18. Peter Gomes, Never Give Up! And Other Sermons Preached at Harvard, 2008–2010, ed. Cynthia Wight Rossano (Cambridge: Memorial Church, Harvard University, 2011) p. 21.
19. Karen Campbell, “Answering deep questions — there’s not an app for that,” interview with Howard Gardner, The Boston Globe, October 8, 2012, p. G14.
20. Gomes, p. 41.
21. Ian McEwan, “The Lever: Where Novelists Stand to Move the World,” (lecture, Harvard University, April 17, 2012).
22. See, for example, Patricia Strach, “Making Higher Education Affordable: Policy Design in Postwar America,” Journal of Policy History, Vol. 21, No. 1 (January 2009), pp. 61-88 (esp. pp. 65-67 and notes 19-28).
23. Robert Maynard Hutchins, “The Threat to American Education,” ��DZ��������’s, December 30, 1944, pp. 20-21.
24. “‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says,” Stanford Report, June 14, 2005, .

The �ֲ���ý College Chapel became the Peter J. Gomes Chapel on Oct. 25 as hundreds of friends and colleagues of the late preacher and teacher gathered to remember him in words and song.

The Rev. Jonathan Walton, Peter Gomes’ successor as Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in The Memorial Church at Harvard, delivers the sermon at the service of naming the Gomes Chapel. Photo: Mike Bradley/�ֲ���ý College.

Thoughtfully programmed, the 90-minute chapel service painted a picture of the complex and beloved Gomes, one of the brightest lights in the constellation of �ֲ���ý alumni. From the invocation by Bill Blaine-Wallace, multifaith chaplain at �ֲ���ý, to the benediction by Emily Wright-Magoon, associate multifaith chaplain, the service established Gomes’ personal and intellectual ties to �ֲ���ý, the college that he credited as a formative force in his life.

Ultimately, in the sermon of the Rev. Jonathan L. Walton, Gomes’ successor as Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in The Memorial Church at Harvard, the event situated Gomes and �ֲ���ý in a greater moral landscape illuminated by faith, tenacity and hope.

“He relished this college, he cherished this chapel.”

And all this in a setting in which Gomes would likely have found much delight. “He relished this college. He cherished this chapel,” as one of the speakers, Carl Benton Straub, professor emeritus of religion and Clark A. Griffith Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies, told the crowd.

Just days before the 100th anniversary of the groundbreaking for the building, its stone walls were warmed by the presence of hundreds of people steeped in deep feeling for its namesake, ornamented by pomp and spectacle, and bathed in music from Bach to Paganini to Gomes’ Harvard friend Carson Cooman.

No images in slideshow.

In timing and content, the service also served as prelude to the much-anticipated inauguration of A. Clayton Spencer as �ֲ���ý’ eighth president on Oct. 26. �ֲ���ý trustees, active and retired, were on hand for the naming, as were three of Spencer’s predecessors as �ֲ���ý president: Donald Harward, Elaine Hansen and Nancy Cable, whose term as interim president directly preceded Spencer’s.

A handful of the delegates who will represent different educational institutions at Spencer’s installation were also in attendance. And the service highlighted the �ֲ���ý-Harvard bond embodied by Gomes and now by �ֲ���ý’ new president, who served Harvard for 15 years, most recently as vice president for policy. In addition to Walton, that little school down the road in Cambridge also sent the Rev. Wendel W. Meyer, associate minister for administration in The Memorial Church to �ֲ���ý to speak.

Also among the Harvard contingent was violinist Ryu Goto, Harvard ’11, a Deutsche Grammophon recording artist whose virtuosic rendition of a work by Paganini seemed to capture in sound the diverse dimensions of Gomes’ character.

Courage, intelligence, delight, generosity, and humility.

If Straub provided the closest focus on Gomes’ time at �ֲ���ý, it was Meyer who gave us the closest analysis of his character. The eloquent Meyer cited five qualities that he associates with his former colleague: courage, intelligence, delight, generosity, and humility — and founded on and enabled by a profound Christian faith.

The scripture reading for the service was Hebrews 12:1, which exhorts the reader to cast off impediments and run before the eyes of a “cloud of witnesses” who have made that same journey.

In his sermon, Walton built a long and masterful rhetorical arc from his relationship with President Spencer, through past �ֲ���ý presidents and other central figures, to the inspirational story of injured Olympic runner Derek Redmond hobbling across the finish line with his father by his side — and finally brought it home by reminding his listeners of the lesson from Ecclesiastes that the race is not given to the swift nor the strong, but to him or her who endures to the end.

The Rev. Peter Gomes ’65 is shown with members of his class during the Reunion parade in 2005. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College.

Three members of the �ֲ���ý faculty and the college’s multifaith chaplain offer a panel discussion titled The Intersecting Identities of the Reverend Peter Gomes ’65: Navigating Race, Religion, Sexuality and Politics  at noon Saturday, Oct. 27, in the Perry Atrium of Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).

The discussion follows the Oct. 25 naming of the college’s century-old chapel after Gomes, a member of the �ֲ���ý class of 1965 who served Harvard University as Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in The Memorial Church. Gomes, a beloved member of the �ֲ���ý community and a nationally influential preacher, died in February 2011.

The Gomes events are part of the celebration of the Oct. 26 inauguration of A. Clayton Spencer as �ֲ���ý’ eighth president. The Saturday panel is open to the public at no cost. Lunch will be served. No reservations are required.

The panel is sponsored by the �ֲ���ý Alumni Council, the alumni organization �ֲ���ý PRIDE, the Multifaith Chaplaincy and the Office of Intercultural Education, as well as the student organizations OutFront, which provides a forum for LGBT issues, and Amandla!, which promotes better understanding of the many communities of the African diaspora.

For more information, please email Melanie Mala Ghosh ’93 at mala_ghosh@hotmail.com or Larry Handerhan ’05 at larry.handerhan@gmail.com.

The panelists are Stephen Engel, assistant professor of politics; Myron Beasley, associate professor of African American studies and American cultural studies; and Bill Blaine-Wallace, multifaith chaplain. Leslie Hill, associate professor of politics, will moderate the panel.

Considered one of America’s most distinguished preachers by the 1970s (Time Magazine singled him out as one of “seven star preachers” in December 1979), Gomes became a prominent spiritual voice against intolerance after he announced in 1991 that he was gay.

“I now have an unambiguous vocation — a mission — to address the religious causes and roots of homophobia,” he told The Washington Post months later. “I will devote the rest of my life to addressing the ‘religious case’ against gays.”

Pursuit of that mission would include publication of the nationally best-selling books “The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Heart and Mind” and “Sermons: Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living in 2002,” even as Gomes’ writing and scholarship continued to extend into wider areas, noted The New York Times, such as early American religions, Elizabethan Puritanism, church music and the African-American experience.

In a 1987 profile in �ֲ���ý Magazine, Gomes said that that his famous embrace of tradition, ritual and history reflected his belief that the Christian church is most alive when it is passing enduring “ideals and ideas” from one generation to the next.

“What I’m interested in are those truths, values and commitments that make people respond to the ultimate hopes, ultimate goods,” he said.

In turn, Gomes added, the human battle between justice and oppression cannot be measured in our own moment. “If we did everything for our own time and our own generation, and expected to see results, nothing of worth would get done,” he said. “That’s why I’m in it for the long haul.”

A former �ֲ���ý trustee who served on the board for more than two decades, Gomes received the Benjamin E. Mays Medal from the �ֲ���ý Alumni Association in 1998 and delivered the college’s Sesquicentennial address in 2005.

The Rev. Professor Peter J. Gomes ’65, D.D. ’96, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard University, died Feb. 28, 2011, at Massachusetts General Hospital of complications from a stroke he suffered in December. He was 68 years old.

March 4 update [2]: The will be held at 11 a.m. Tuesday, March 8, at his hometown church, the First Baptist Church of Plymouth, Mass.

March 4 update: At �ֲ���ý, “A Time to Remember and Give Thanks for the Completed Life of the Rev. Peter Gomes ’65,” noon to 12:30 p.m. Monday, March 7,  in the Chapel.  A College-wide memorial service is being planned for a future date.

• of the March 3 service of Compline in the Memorial Church that concluded the day’s silent vigil
• including insights by Bill Hiss ’66 and President Hansen
• Obituaries in , and
• in the New Yorker by Henry Louise Gates Jr., L.H.D ’94
• Morley Safer of CBS News remembers Gomes with a repeat of this 1997
• An alum’s featuring audio of Gomes’ Alumni Memorial Service sermon, his last public �ֲ���ý appearance
• at the memorial service for Milton Lindholm ’35 in March 2010
• at �ֲ���ý
• “Degrees of Separation” in �ֲ���ý Magazine about his 2005 Sesquicentennial visit
• about his 1998 visit to receive the Benjamin Mays Medal

“The Rev. Gomes was, among many things, a remarkable preacher, dedicated scholar and accomplished author,” President Elaine Tuttle Hansen said today in her announcement to the �ֲ���ý community.

Peter Gomes embraces Dean Emeritus of Admissions Milton Lindholm ’35 at his 90th birthday in 2001. Gomes dedicated his 2003 book, “Strength for the Journey,” to the late Lindholm and his wife, Jane Ault Lindholm ’37, thanking them for their “rich friendship,” adding, “I thank God for them.” Photograph by Fred Field.

From the 1965 yearbook, Peter Gomes, a history major, poses as president of the Campus Association, next to vice president Anthony DiAngelis ’65. The CA supported the “liberal spirit of inquiry, thought and action” through the “expression of religious, social and intellectual” means.

He also told the first-year students that “the day will come when you’ll discover the necessity of relying upon your inner resources of heart, mind and spirit. And if those have been wisely and zealously cultivated at �ֲ���ý…you will not only endure, you will indeed overcome.” Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

Following Commencement 1996, at which he received an honorary doctor of divinity degree, Peter Gomes congratulates fellow honorary degree recipient Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist. Photograph by Marc Glass ’88.

At Reunion 1998, Peter Gomes ’65 talks with Jim Carignan ’61. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

At Reunion 1998, Gomes playfully looks for the Class of 1965 ivy stone, located somewhere on Carnegie Science Hall.

During Reunion 1998, Peter Gomes talks with former College treasurer Norm Ross ’22 and wife Marjorie Pillsbury Ross ’23. Gomes lived with the Rosses during his student days. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

At Convocation that year, he told first-year students that �ֲ���ý is about “constructing a life worth living.” Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

Peter Gomes shares a laugh with President Hansen during the Convocation 2005 processional. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

Peter Gomes sings during the Alumni Memorial Service at Reunion 2010. �ֲ���ý, he said during his sermon, is a “beloved community of memory and hope.” Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

In his sermon, Gomes said that “it is our duty to remember, to recall that which was, to preserve the best of that for time to come.” Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

Peter Gomes in a familiar place, behind the pulpit, here at the �ֲ���ý Chapel delivering the sermon for the Alumni Memorial Service during Reunion 2010. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

Peter Gomes greets fellow alumni following the Alumni Memorial Service during Reunion 2010. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

Professor Emeritus of History Jim Leamon ’55 greets Peter Gomes at Reunion 2005, at which Gomes delivered the Sesquicentennial address. “We do not at �ֲ���ý simply want to be great, though we want to be great,” he said. “Being great is not all that it’s cracked up to be — without being good.” �ֲ���ý did not just impart wisdom, he added, but “also gave us a large dose of virtue — we were meant to stand for something and to make a difference in the world.” Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

During the Alumni Parade at Reunion 2005, Peter Gomes and his classmates hold their yearbook portraits. Gomes told the younger alumni that “once upon a time, we looked like you, and sooner than you think, you will look like us. It is inevitable, unavoidable, and part of a glorious transformation by which we are all always young.” The Class of ’65 wore shirts that said, “Isn’t It Funny… We Still Look the Same!” Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

She pointed specifically to the words that conferred an �ֲ���ý honorary doctor of divinity degree on Gomes in 1996: “You have, in the power of thoughtful and eloquent expression, from pulpits and from the public yard, given testimony to principled action, to moral authority, to the inspiration of belief, and to the charity of human worth.”

“I now have an unambiguous vocation.”

Considered one of America’s most distinguished preachers by the 1970s (Time singled him out as one of “seven star preachers” in December 1979), Gomes became a prominent spiritual voice against intolerance after he announced in 1991 that he was gay.

“I now have an unambiguous vocation — a mission — to address the religious causes and roots of homophobia,” he told The Washington Post months later. “I will devote the rest of my life to addressing the ‘religious case’ against gays.”

Pursuit of that mission would include publication of the national best-selling books and in 2002, even as his writing and scholarship continued to extend into wider areas, noted , such as early American religions, Elizabethan Puritanism, church music and the African-American experience.

“Gomesie,” as he was known to his �ֲ���ý contemporaries, sustained a particularly intense and loving relationship with his alma mater and with �ֲ���ý people, especially his classmates and contemporaries, whom he buoyed during his many public moments on the �ֲ���ý campus.

In the video below, Gomes delivers a rhetorical romp through �ֲ���ý history and culture in his Sesquicentennial address in 2005:

In 1998, that “except for my parents, I owe everything valuable, precious and honorable to �ֲ���ý…. My ultimate epitaph should be, ‘I went to �ֲ���ý.'”

In 2002, he offered remarks to a gathering of �ֲ���ý volunteers, suggesting that “despite all of the sentimentality…most of us are loyal to �ֲ���ý not because of the past but because of the future. We are loyal to �ֲ���ý because at some point in our past somebody invested in our future. That is what animates and unites us in our loyal service to the College.”

And the future of �ֲ���ý, he said, “is really you. The future at �ֲ���ý is always people — the fallible flesh of the human experience — and what an enormous capacity for good, for goodness, and for imagination we represent.”

A former �ֲ���ý trustee who served on the board for more than two decades, Gomes received the Benjamin E. Mays Medal in 1998 and delivered the Sesquicentennial address in 2005. Last March, he at the memorial service for Milton Lindholm ’35, Ed.M. ’39, L.H.D. ’04.

In June, he delivered the sermon at the Alumni Memorial Service at his 45th Reunion, and he preached almost every summer at Ocean Park, a seaside retreat with historical connections to �ֲ���ý’ founding by Freewill Baptist clergy.

Gomes “knew a lot about the religious history of Androscoggin County,” his longtime friend  Bill Hill ’66 told the “He encouraged many people like me to make commitments to understanding it…. Peter urged �ֲ���ý students to get involved with the local community from his position on the board. He had a clear impact on the Harward Center for Community Partnerships.”

“What I’m interested in are those truths, values and commitments that make people respond to the ultimate hopes, ultimate goods.”

In a 1987 profile in �ֲ���ý Magazine, Gomes told Peter Moore ’78 that his famous embrace of tradition, ritual and history reflected his belief that the Christian church is most alive when it is passing enduring “ideals and ideas” from one generation to the next. “What I’m interested in are those truths, values and commitments that make people respond to the ultimate hopes, ultimate goods,” he said.

In turn, Gomes added, the human battle between justice and oppression cannot be measured in our own moment. “If we did everything for our own time and our own generation, and expected to see results, nothing of worth would get done,” he said. “That’s why I’m in it for the long haul.”

The Rev. Peter J. Gomes, named one of America’s most influential preachers by Time magazine, opens the 151st academic year at �ֲ���ý College with a convocation address at 4:10 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 6, on the main quadrangle. In case of rain, the event will take place in Alumni Gymnasium.

Gomes’ convocation address will explore themes related to the college’s 150th anniversary.

Gomes is Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard University and minister in the university’s Memorial Church. A 1965 �ֲ���ý graduate, he was first elected a college trustee in 1973 and is in the fifth year of his current term on the board.

Gomes will face about 2,400 �ֲ���ý faculty, staff and students, including 511 students new to �ֲ���ý (another new student is studying with the �ֲ���ý program in Russia this fall). The �ֲ���ý student body will total some 1,844, with 1,688 on campus and 156 in off-campus programs this fall.

An American Baptist minister, Gomes belongs to Harvard’s faculties of divinity and of arts and sciences. Named one of the nation’s seven most influential preachers by Time in 1979, he is an insistent voice of conscience.

Gomes’ closely reasoned sermons rank among the quintessential Harvard experiences. As likely to quote T.S. Eliot and Mae West as the Bible, he delivers serious moral content with a welcoming humor. He is a sought-after speaker whose engagements have included the inaugurations of presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

In his most recent address at �ֲ���ý, during the alumni reunion weekend in June, Gomes offered observations inspired by the college’s sesquicentennial. “�ֲ���ý was always peculiar. It was peculiar in that it involved women and men on equal footing. It was peculiar in that it had persons of color in its earliest classes,” he noted.

“And it was peculiar in that it was the first college chartered by the state of Maine,” as Massachusetts chartered Bowdoin and Colby prior to Maine statehood.

Gomes is the author of several books, including the 1996 best seller The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart (Morrow) and his most recent, Strength for the Journey: Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living (HarperSanFrancisco, 2003). He has received 30 honorary degrees, including one from �ֲ���ý in 1996, and in 2001 was honored with Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award. He is an Honorary Fellow of Emmanuel College, the University of Cambridge, England, where the Gomes Lectureship is established in his name.

A native of Boston, Gomes graduated from �ֲ���ý and from Harvard Divinity School. After teaching and serving as director of freshman studies at Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee, Ala., he arrived at Harvard in 1970 as assistant minister in the Memorial Church. He has been minister there since 1974, when he was appointed to the Plummer professorship. He is a leading authority on the Pilgrims of Plymouth.

This fall’s class of first-year students at �ֲ���ý comes from 34 states and from 35 countries ranging from Azerbaijan to Venezuela. Forty-eight of the first-years are from Maine. The entire student body represents 75 countries and 47 states, with the most from Massachusetts, at 443 students. The next largest group comes from Maine, at 194. As for the other New England states, Connecticut sent 145, New Hampshire 128, Vermont 52 and Rhode Island 29. New York state sent 181.

Highlights of reunion weekend include a 100th birthday celebration for longtime Lewiston resident Norman Ross, a 1922 graduate of �ֲ���ý and treasurer emeritus of the college. �ֲ���ý graduates from the classes of 1938, 1943, 1948, 1958, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1973, 1982, 1983, 1984 and 1988 will don costumes and, following a century-old tradition, process on the main quadrangle in the annual alumni parade at 11:30 a.m.

Following the parade, the Rev. Peter J. Gomes, a 1965 graduate of �ֲ���ý and Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard University, will receive the Benjamin Elijah Mays Award at a noon ceremony on the main quadrangle. The Mays Award, established in 1982 and first awarded to Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays, a member of the class of 1920, is conferred upon a �ֲ���ý alumnus or alumna who has performed distinguished service to the larger community and the college.

Laura Young Connelly of Cape Elizabeth, a 1988 graduate of �ֲ���ý and campaign director for Demont & Associates Inc. of Portland, will receive the Distinguished Young Alumni Award. Given annually since 1987, the Distinguished Young Alumni Award recognizes exemplary service to the college from an alumnus or alumna who has graduated in the last 15 years. Grant C. Reynolds and his wife, Joanne T. Reynolds, will receive the Alumni Distinguished Service Award for service to the college. Grant Reynolds, a 1957 graduate of �ֲ���ý, is a consultant in Potomac, Md. Joanne Reynolds, a 1958 graduate of �ֲ���ý, is an associate broker for RE/MAX Realty Group in Potomac, Md.