The Presidency essay cites Bates' commitment to community

Syracuse University president Nancy Cantor, writing in The Presidency, the magazine of the American Council on Education, urges U.S. colleges and universities to “leverage our diverse and unique institutional identities as place-based institutions.” She notes that “institutions large and small have joined with partners in their own communities to place the arts and humanities at the center of urban revitalization, as we are doing in Syracuse. From Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, to the University at Buffalo, to the University of Southern California, higher education institutions are pooling their cultural and intellectual gravity to draw people back to downtowns.”