Hiss, William C.

Bill Hiss is the Vice President for External Affairs and a Lecturer in Asian Studies at Bates College. He serves as part of the President’s office, supervising the Office of Career Services, handling federal and state government relations, national and regional press relations, and doing alumni, fundraising and communications work for the College. As a Lecturer in Asian Studies on the Bates faculty, he teaches a First Year Seminar course, “Literature through Cataclysm,” in modern Russian, Japanese and Vietnamese fiction and film, and serves as an academic advisor to the students in his FYS course.

From 2000 to 2003 Bill was the Vice President for External and Alumni Affairs, supervising the Alumni, College Relations and Career Services offices. Bill supervised the Admissions and Financial Aid offices at Bates for twenty-two years, from 1978 to 2000. From 1994 to 2000 he was the Vice President for Administrative Services, where he supervised the offices of Admissions, Financial Aid, and College Relations. He was Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid from 1978 to 1994.

Bill took his undergraduate degree with High Honors in English from Bates, with a junior year abroad at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. Awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship to Harvard Divinity School, he took a master’s degree in social ethics. He also earned masters and doctoral degrees in English from Tufts, where his dissertation, a history of a utopian religious community in Maine, won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship.

As an admissions dean, Bill put strong emphasis on careful individual evaluation of candidates, keeping Bates’s traditional insistence on hour-long personal interviews and careful evaluation of writing samples. But Bates was also a leader in careful planning and research on admissions criteria. In 1984, after five years of study, the Bates faculty voted to make SAT’s optional for admission, and in the fall of 1990, voted to make all standardized testing optional. During the years Bill led the Admissions office, applications to Bates rose by 90%. In 2004, Bill co-authored with a graduating Bates senior a 20-year report on the outcomes from Bates’ optional testing policy that has attracted widespread national attention, and has been a significant factor in the decisions of many more colleges to make testing optional in admissions, and to put additional emphasis on multiple evidences of talent, discipline and intelligence.

From 1991 to 1997, Bill served as an appointee from the United States Senate to the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, which advises the Congress and the Secretary of Education on national financial aid policy. He also serves on the Board and as chair of the Research Committee of the Senator George J. Mitchell Scholarship Research Institute, a major source of scholarship funds and research on higher education access issues in Maine. He also chairs the regional council of the Maine Community Foundation. He is an occasional consultant to secondary and higher education institutions, and a frequent author and commentator on higher education issues in the media.