A higher-education reporter recently posed a question to a listserv for college magazine editors. Had we noticed a change in the tone of class notes during the recession?

While �ֲ���ý class notes are freewheeling (you all can say almost anything as long as it doesn’t frighten the horses), the self-selected content may not be the best barometer of Bobcat Nation. Even so, I asked class secretary Katie Tibbetts Morello ’91, who produced a 6,300-word class letter last spring, what she thought. She was struck by how many classmates have made significant life changes “to do something that they enjoy. It sounds like our alums are willing to be flexible to find happiness.”

Reunion is another venue where you can gauge alumni attitudes, though it’s like testing New England’s mood during a Sox game at Fenway: Most everyone is on the ecstatic side.

Ebullience aside, it’s worth mentioning a pair of Reunion class discussions this year — two days and 25 years apart — that were both introspective and direct in addressing how we face good and bad times. On Friday, the Class of 1959 talked about “Success Redefined.” Peggy Montgomery ’59 summed up the class mood by quoting the Rev. Forrest Church of the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City. “Want what you have; do what you can; and be who you are,” wrote the author and theologian.

Speaking to his classmates in Keck Classroom, Jack Keigwin ’59 said, “I don’t need to talk to you about being relevant. All of you are involved in something important beyond yourself. Discussing relevancy is irrelevant.” That line drew a laugh.

For Burton Harris ’59, a turning point came in the 1990s. He was enjoying his corporate law work but one day he realized that “Boston lawyer” had become his sole identity. “It was time to get out,” he said. So he enrolled in the North Bennet Street School to chase a passion: woodworking.

“All of you are involved in something important beyond yourself,” Keigwin said.

The next morning, classmates from 1984 shared “Stories of Change” from their midlife perspectives. Chris Lynch ’84 worked on Wall Street, where every day, 5:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m, was a “fight to the death — and I loved it.” One evening his young daughter, seeing Dad at home for once, asked, “Are you here for a sleepover?” Chris and his family have since decamped to Maine for a new career in luxury real estate.

Sarah Hammond Creighton ’84 offered this thought: “You can have it all but not at the same time.” The comment prompted Heidi Lovett ’84 to talk about leaving Florida for Washington, D.C., to take a federal fisheries management position that she really wanted. What she lost was a community she loved. “I helped to start a farmer’s market there,” she said. “It was hard to leave.”

Burton Harris circled back to �ֲ���ý and back in time. He posed a question that any reader might consider. “In our hearts,” he asked, “do we still have the feeling of being a �ֲ���ý freshman and willing to try something new?”

By H. Jay Burns, Editor

Then, midway through Ken’s first semester, his dad lost his job. But Ken didn’t lose out. “�ֲ���ý really came through for me,” he recalls. “I received grants and loans, and I did campus work. The �ֲ���ý philosophy was, ‘We have you here. We want you to stay here.'”

Spalding had reason to reminisce after attending the Mount David Society Scholarship Luncheon on April 3, where supporters of �ֲ���ý financial aid met current students who benefit from their generosity.

Currently, about 37 percent of �ֲ���ý students receive more than $20 million in scholarship grant aid. A few of them spoke at the April luncheon, held in the Jarnryd Room of the new dining Commons on the day of the annual Mount David Summit.

“It makes it gratifying to give and compelling to give more.”Rising from her seat, Nicole Svirsky ’09 of Newburyport, Mass., talked about her senior thesis combining political economy and law. She examined the transnational barriers that inhibit effective child-labor policies, scrutinizing ideological differences between the International Labour Organization and the World Trade Organization and doing comparative case studies of Pakistan and Brazil.

At �ֲ���ý, “I have learned and matured as a person and a scholar,” she concluded. “I have made friends here that I will keep in touch with for the rest of my life. The �ֲ���ý community is fantastic, and we are all fortunate to be a part of it.”

Another speaker, Oscar Cancio ’08 of Los Angeles, talked about his unlikely hockey career at �ֲ���ý as a metaphor for opportunity.

“That’s what gets to me,” says Spalding, the Maine woods project coordinator for RESTORE: The North Woods, a conservation organization. “Given the opportunity to attend �ֲ���ý, these students have accomplished so much, and they appreciate the support they’ve been given. It makes it gratifying to give and compelling to give more.”

As some �ֲ���ý students (and alums) look back on their experience, members of a younger cohort — high school seniors — are now deciding where they’ll attend college. About half of all incoming �ֲ���ý students typically apply to six or more schools, and April is when students compare the colleges that accept them.

Financial aid is part of the comparison.

“After acceptance letters go out, it takes about a week before we hear questions from families,” says Wendy Glass, director of Student Financial Services. “They spend time looking carefully at all of the offers they’ve received from colleges. They are being cautious and realistic about this financial commitment.”

When families do start asking questions, an increasingly common one reflects the current U.S. recession. “Families are concerned about moving forward, about what they can expect if their circumstances change,” says Glass.

Do you have questions about the �ֲ���ý financial aid program? Contact the Office of Student Financial Services.

The answer hasn’t changed much since Ken Spalding was a student. �ֲ���ý still meets the demonstrated need of all matriculated students, for better or worse.

“We will strive to make decisions that are consistent and equitable from one year to the next.””Paying for a �ֲ���ý education is a collaborative effort among parents, students, and �ֲ���ý,” Glass explains. (That hasn’t changed, either: as a student, Spalding worked two summer jobs at 70-plus hours at week.) “When parents ask about the future, we try to paint a realistic picture of how an aid package might change if circumstances change. We reassure families that we will strive to make decisions that are consistent and equitable from one year to the next.”

Glass and her staff field many concerns and outright complaints, but she makes sure not to forget the happy words from families just beginning their �ֲ���ý relationship.

It might be just a handwritten note added to a financial form: “Our daughter is absolutely thrilled to be coming to �ֲ���ý. We are committed to doing what we can to make this happen, and we deeply appreciate the aid you’ve provided to our family.”

Facing the worst economic crisis in generations and an unpopular war in Iraq, President Barack Obama arrived in Washington shattering racial barriers and promising momentous change in the way the United States conducts itself at home and abroad. Reporters from around the globe have descended on the nation’s capital to document the unfolding historic drama.

American newspapers, meanwhile, are pulling their correspondents out.

Wracked by declining readership and advertising revenues, daily papers in every major American city have scaled back their Washington bureaus or closed them altogether. It is the latest sign of a decade-long financial skid in the American news industry, where austerity measures have become commonplace.

But as Washington correspondents vanish, troubling questions arise. If Thomas Jefferson was right that “a well-informed citizenry” is necessary for a healthy democracy, what happens when the American public is unaware of their elected officials’ work in Washington? Could the result be pay-to-play journalism, where information is increasingly available only to those able and willing to pay top dollar for it?

Brian McGrory ’84, metro editor at The Boston Globe and the paper’s former White House correspondent, explains the watchdog role of Washington-based reporters.

“Residents elect people to represent them in Washington, so we don’t want those politicians going off and forgetting where they came from,” he says. “We ought to keep close tabs on how they are spending their campaign money, who is giving them contributions, and whether they are fulfilling their campaign promises. To pull out of Washington and leave these guys uncovered would be a travesty.”

Yet few newspapers have been spared from the current cutbacks. The Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the San Diego Union-Tribune have pulled their reporters out of Washington. Cox Newspapers, which had 30 people in its Washington bureau including correspondents for The Austin (Texas) American-Statesmanand The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, announced it will close its D.C. operation in April.

The Tribune company, which filed for bankruptcy protection last year, combined the Washington bureaus of the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times, cutting in half a staff of what had been 70 people only a year ago. The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post even reduced the width of their papers to save money on newsprint.

My own former employer, The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, is keeping a two-person Washington operation intact even as its owner, the publishing giant Newhouse, closed its D.C. bureau in November.

To save money, newspapers fill their pages with stories from subscription wire services such as The Associated Press and Reuters. Yet wire services are designed to get news out broadly, not explain what a new federal budget means for public education, environmental protection, or police capabilities in, say, Lewiston.

“If you look at newspapers today, they are mostly wire stories that are national or international,” says Jeremy Pelofsky ’97, who covers Congress for Reuters. “You have to wonder if the interests of a city are being served by a wire report. And that’s coming from a wire reporter!”

The result of newspaper cutbacks will not be a news blackout, however. Quite the opposite. News of the Obama presidency and the work of the 111th Congress will explode out of Washington in such overwhelming volume that it will be impossible for all but the most dedicated hermits to ignore.

What will be lost is context and meaning. The main task of Washington correspondents has always been to stand at the center of power, politics, and policy and tell the folks back home what it all means to them. At their best, Washington correspondents aren’t merely reporters, but explainers, experts who “understand how the system works in D.C. and can apply that understanding to the issues and the political players most relevant to readers back home,” says Carolyn Ryan ’86, deputy metro editor at The New York Times.

Those explainers are the people who are losing their jobs.

At this writing, President Obama is talking about kick-starting the economy with a public works building spree reminiscent of FDR’s. It is a Washington correspondent’s job to find out which bridge and road projects back home will get green-lighted — and which won’t. It also falls to the Washington correspondent to see if the money is being disbursed equitably, what role politics is playing, and whether someone’s brother-in-law is getting a sweetheart deal to do the paving.

The value of a Washington bureau was never more evident to me than after Hurricane Katrina, in August 2005. With The Times-Picayune‘s downtown New Orleans offices flooded and abandoned, it fell to the Washington bureau to collect stories from reporters in the field and post them on the newspaper’s Web site. After the storm, the Washington bureau was also charged with tracking what Congress and the Bush administration were doing — and not doing — to aid in the recovery and the awesome task of rebuilding a major American city.

Former newspaper journalist Bill Walsh ’86 is now a senior strategic adviser for AARP in Washington, D.C.

If you think the current economic recession has prompted finger-pointing, check what Harry Rowe ’12, the first editor of this publication, wrote in 1936: “Higher educational institutions are on trial. They are regarded by the Right as communistic; while the Left considers them to be citadels of conservatism.”

Perhaps Rowe was still stinging from an incident a few years earlier when former Maine Gov. Percival Baxter indulged in some statewide Red-baiting. During a December 1931 speech to the Bangor Rotary Club, Baxter said that “one of our Maine colleges is more deeply involved in [teaching communism and socialism] than the others, and many of its students already have been brought under the spell of these false and un-American doctrines.”

�ֲ���ý President Clifton Daggett Gray offered the first bit of payback, which Baxter apparently deemed “abusive,” according to The �ֲ���ý Student. The second retort came from the Student itself. While acknowledging that some �ֲ���ý students were active Socialists, the paper asked, “What of it? They are moved by a wish to alleviate the suffering of mankind.” Furthermore, the Student said, “as students confronted with a sick society…we demand the right to seek our own ideals from the raw materials of truth.”

Around that time, the Student reported on a 1931 economic conference in Augusta. There, a Maine electric company official stated that Maine colleges were teaching “babble” and that unemployment is not the “concern of society or of government.” The official’s comment prompted an immediate reaction from �ֲ���ý Professor of Economics (and former debate coach) John Murray Carroll, attending the conference with nine of his students. “Fiery” is how the Student described their subsequent exchange.

The point of all this is not that Carroll called someone out. And it’s not about specific political or economic beliefs. It’s that Carroll’s students saw that ideas are capable of some heavy lifting.

A Maine native who graduated from �ֲ���ý in 1909, Carroll was described as a professor who “tried to induce the student to see the significance of ideas.” It’s known that he inspired the likes of Frank Coffin ’40, LL.D. ’59, the greatly respected federal jurist who, just last fall, was honored for his contributions to legal aid for the poor here in Maine. And he likely inspired the very Student editor who likely wrote those editorials mentioned above. Valery Burati ’32, editor-in-chief in 1931–32, became a labor organizer who, in post-World War II Japan, helped to establish Sohyo, a major confederation of trade unions.

The legacy of professors like John Murray Carroll is seen on the next page, where you can read how anthropologist Elizabeth Eames’ students helped area businesses identify employment barriers facing Somali residents. And on page 28 is a story about psychologist Georgia Nigro’s work to illuminate why some boys fail to thrive in school.

And if there’s a difference between then and now, at least when it comes to the work that �ֲ���ý people do in Maine, it’s that finger-pointing has been replaced by handshakes and, at times, a nice round of applause.

By H. Jay Burns, editor

Read the Bloomberg.com story .