A horn sounded. Eight 10-member teams cheered. And dodgeball began.

Featuring student vs. faculty-staff teams, the March 2 tournament in Alumni Gym was organized by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Student Government, the Security Advisory Committee, and the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, as a fundraiser for Farwell Elementary School’s food pantry.

The games had the added benefit of strengthening community among students, faculty, and staff, said Walter Washington ’19 of Fleetwood, N.Y., the student government president.

All the hosting organizations had “these same kind of ideas of bringing everyone together, so why don’t we blend all of our groups and see what we can come up with?“ Washington said.

“All the people that were involved behind the scenes are really where the greatness of this event is shown. It just shows what happens when you bring so many creative ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ minds together.â€�

This October 2010 image shows Mikey Pasek ’12, at right, with Jourdan Fanning ’13 moving furniture in the Office of Intercultural Education, a location that includes space for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Hillel. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College.

Soggy rice in Commons, issues with general education requirements or unjust national energy policies — many of us are content to complain about the issues that irk us on a daily basis.

Not Mikey Pasek ’12, senior class co-president. It isn’t Pasek’s style to grumble while waiting around for improvement. Instead he feels duty-bound to take action and make change happen.

A native of Ardmore, Pa., Pasek has served as class co-president since his junior year, and is a student government representative to both the President’s and Dean’s advisory committees. He was one of four students taking part in the committee that revised the college’s mission statement in 2010. In all these positions, Pasek challenges the apathy that he sometimes recognizes among peers and sees as symptomatic of larger cultural tendencies.

He explains, “We are so lucky to live in a world of democratic institutions — at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ the student has a voice, and if you don’t take up your own voice, you take away part of your own self-determination.â€�

Pasek finds that one of the most effective means of championing issues is to make specific in-person appeals — one-on-ones with peers or campus officials. Creating personal connections, highlighting individual potential and establishing a narrative other people can feel positive about, quite simply, all get results.

At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, he says, “appealing to an institutional framework is often not the most effective way of getting support. Campaigning for a personal cause shows you believe in what you’re working for and makes people excited to help you.â€�

Pasek is just as straightforward with his opinions of the world beyond ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. He has contributed several opinion pieces to various publications in the last four years, including articles in Lewiston’s Sun Journal and Jewish Exponent, a Philadelphia-based weekly newspaper.

Pasek also helped co-found ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ J-Street U, a chapter of the national student activist organization promoting peace, security and social justice for Israel and Palestine. He serves as vice-president for the local chapter and is the national organization’s co-chair for New England.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ chapter is highly regarded by the national organization. With Pasek and President Alex Friedman ’12 at the helm, the chapter collected 500 student and staff signatures that persuaded Maine’s U.S Rep. Michael Michaud to sign the so-called Price-Welch letter encouraging continued U.S-Palestinian aid.

Pasek’s interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict shapes his academic experience as well. He is currently gearing up to defend a yearlong honors thesis on American Jewish perception of Israel for his self-designed political psychology major.

Recognizing that not all ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students share his ease in leadership roles, Pasek has also helped facilitate ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ communities of interest that he is not as personally tied to. Co-president of Hillel, Pasek does not identify as particularly religious, but is aware that Hillel serves an important role on campus creating a space for a group sometimes underrepresented on campus.

Pasek is well-attuned to the activist’s delicate balancing of self-interest and the common good. For him, it boils down to engaging issues that one is passionate about, but also appreciating that part of effective engagement is removing oneself from the equation. He cites a well-known saying by the ancient Jewish sage Hillel: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And, if not now, when?”

— By Elana Leopold ’12

Students received the rare opportunity to compare 21st-century college life with the Versailles experiences of the French queen Marie Antoinette as ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College opened its 153rd academic year on Sept. 5.

“There is an essential rightness about your presence here,” Convocation speaker John R. Cole told the incoming ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ class of 2011. It was an assurance derived from Cole’s sly, earthy and erudite interpretation of a correspondence between the teenage queen and her mother, Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa.

But where the 18th-century empress exhorted the rambunctious Marie Antoinette to trust in her and in God, Cole told some 460 new ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students to “trust me and my kind, and trust yourselves.”

The Thomas Hedley Reynolds Professor of History at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, Cole was the featured speaker at a Convocation held beneath cloudless skies on the college’s historic Quad.

The incoming first-year and transfer students, along with hundreds of faculty, staff and upperclass students, also heard college President Elaine Tuttle Hansen, who offered an overview of important developments at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½; the Rev. Bill Blaine-Wallace, the college’s multifaith chaplain; Dean of the Faculty Jill Reich; and student government President Bill Jack, whose remarks opened the ceremony.

Introducing Cole as a “historian with a capital H,” Reich explained that Cole’s role as featured speaker was the result of a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ tradition, now in its second year, through which the departing senior class each spring chooses a faculty member to welcome the arriving first-years in the autumn. It’s a tradition, she said, “that acknowledges that each of us stands on the shoulders of those who have gone before us [and] a tradition that recognizes the fundamental place of the faculty-student relationship in the educational environment and life of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.”

Cole began by briefly conjuring up Harry Potter’s Hogwarts as he welcomed the “fellow Muggles and wizards of the class of 2011.” But his address — titled Dress Right, Stand Right, Play Right, Ride Right, Write Right . . ., after Maria Theresa’s exasperated exhortations to her high-living daughter — gave new students much to consider as they learned about 18th-century mores and customs.

“Month after month, year after year,” Cole said, her mother was sending Marie Antoinette “letters of a sort your mothers won’t be sending you. ‘Are you pregnant yet? Why aren’t you pregnant? Get pregnant!'”

As Cole explained, he really wanted his listeners to take from his talk an idea he expressed in two French terms. One was “confiance,” a word much employed by Maria Theresa that’s a cognate for “confidence” but really expresses a much deeper and subtler concept of trust.

In keeping with the concept of the divine right of royalty, Maria Theresa opened her first letter to her daughter at Versailles with the words: “Vous voilà donc où la Providence vous a destinée de vivre” — “So there you are, where Providence has destined you to live.”

Cole told the students, “Whether or not it is God’s doing, here you are. There is an essential rightness about your presence here at this stage of your lives — trust me on this. You can be confident in our honesty, our dedication to serving your interests and our professional competence.

“You can also be confident in yourselves and your promise.”

But Cole, who called himself a “professed doubter,” ended his address with a humorous twist. “Trust me, trust yourselves and good luck to us all,” he told the students, but he went on to discuss the essential duplicity in Marie’s and Maria’s letters to each other.

And Cole concluded, “If anyone tells you once too often . . . ‘trust me,’ that’s a yellow caution signal. And when the speaker is an old man wearing a red dress” —a reference to his own academic gown — “it’s a stop sign. Trust me.”

Telling her listeners that the “volatility of great institutions is more visible than ever at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½,” Hansen told the new arrivals about important changes under way at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. Starting with the construction projects that are changing both the look of the venerable campus and the way students live together, she went on to explain the campus master planning process that is guiding the revitalization of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ infrastructure.

Noting that the class just arrived will be the first to experience the restructured General Education requirements — “You are the pioneers,” Hansen told the class of 2007 — Hansen extended her architectural metaphor to sketch out the new requirements.

Finally, Hansen used her experiences teaching a writing and peer-editing Short Term course to explore the most important development on her list: ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ redoubled efforts to improve diversity on campus. She described the “Believing Game” concept, developed by writing theorist Peter Elbow, in which the reader seeks not to doubt the assertions on the page but to try to see through the author’s eyes and believe what’s written.

Hansen asked her listeners to bring to their endeavors at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ this kind of a generous credulity, this willingness to see through others’ eyes — “to experience and enter into views that look wildly, and possibly unappealingly, different from the outside, but from the inside can help us test, strengthen, modify and improve our own thinking.”

“I’d like to ask you to consider, in the academic year now opening, acting with your freedom and your generosity to enter into those places you have not yet visited — perhaps especially those that seem most alien — and to help those spaces that are under construction by playing, with us, the Believing Game,” she said. “I look forward to working together to expand the elbow room at this great college.”

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