Check out the Commencement livestream on Sunday morning

The livestream of Commencement begins at 9:30 a.m. Sunday, and the ceremony itself starts at 10. We’ve also added a Commencement Week tumblr. Also check out the honorary degree recipients.

Ten (count ’em!) Fulbright grant recipients emerge from Class of 2013

Known as a top producer of students receiving prestigious Fulbright U.S. Student Grants, Bates this month will graduate 10 such students, a record number for the college.

Matthew Auer, Indiana University honors dean, named vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty

A leading scholar and globally engaged expert in the arenas of environmental policy, energy policy, sustainable development and foreign aid, Matthew Auer comes to Bates from Indiana University, where he is dean of the Hutton Honors College and professor of public and environmental affairs. He becomes vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty at Bates on July 1.

599 ways Bates alumni made May 15 a Great Day to Be a Bobcat

The question was this: Would 555 alumni donors respond to the call to make their annual Bates Fund gifts on May 15? Well, it was never really a question. Zooming past the goal, 599 alumni made gifts. The influx pushed overall alumni participation up 3 points in one day, to 37 percent. The end-of-year goal is 55 percent by June 30.

Video: Pringle ’98 and Gottwald ’98 fuse hip hop and modern dance in a Shakespeare adaptation

This Short Term, choreographer and dancer Erin Gottwald ’98 joined rapper, writer, actor and director Postell Pringle ’98 in creating a multidisciplinary adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” that Bates students performed for Lewiston-Auburn schoolchildren.

Trustee Chair Emeritus E. Robert Kinney ’39 dies at 96

E. Robert Kinney ’39, LL.D. ’85, who entered the food industry by canning crabmeat in his Maine home en route to becoming CEO of General Mills, died May 2. A Bates trustee for 27 years, including 17 as chair, he was considered a creative entrepreneur and model corporate leader who, when appointed CEO of General Mills in 1973, was praised for his “good, gutsy Maine business sense” by his predecessor.

Senior thesis Q-and-A: The 1950s debate over Androscoggin River pollution

“Senior thesis sits in my mind as a project that will never actually be mine to take on,” admits first-year Hannah Albertine. But then she met senior Taryn O’Connell, and “I found myself staring directly at the very thing that had appeared so theoretical and scary to me: a big, black three-ring binder.” Inside the binder: O’Connell’s exploration of a citizen vs. business debate about Androscoggin River pollution in the 1950s.

MOOC master speaks at Bates

Al Filreis was named a “Ten Tech Innovator” by The Chronicle of Higher Education for his belief that massively open online courses (MOOCs) can bring the humanities to the masses. But it’s more than a belief, as he told the Bates faculty recently. He seems to have done it.

Bates in the News

Don’t feel bad. Scientific American quotes psychologist Jonathan Adler ’00, who says that negative feelings play a positive role in our well-being. Actor John Ambrosino ’01 talks with the LGBT-focused Boston Spirit Magazine about his lead role in On the Town. On campus, Darby Ray, director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, describes for the Sun Journal a Bates course that found a home in a local elementary school.

So far, it’s worked out well, says reporter Bob Keyes of the Maine Sunday Telegram.

In April, a composer Cyr championed won a Juno Award, the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy.

Composer Vivian Fung won Classical Composition of the Year for her violin concerto, which Cyr recorded with the Metropolis Ensemble and released last fall on the Naxon label imprint Canadian Classics.

Video of the 2011 world premiere of Vivian Fung’s Violin Concerto, performed by violinist Kristin Lee and the Metropolis Ensemble, with Cyr conducting.

Click here to view the embedded video.

1. Watson winner heads to Africa and Asia to ask how various cultures perceive stroke

Olivia Norrmen-Smith ’13 will use her Watson Fellowship, among the most coveted award at highly selective liberal arts colleges, to travel to Africa and Asia to understand the cultural perceptions of medical stroke, one of humankind’s leading causes of death and disability.

2. At 3 percent, the Bates annual fee increase is lowest since 1972

The single fee for 2013–14, covering tuition, room, board and fees, is $58,950 and represents a 3 percent increase over 2012–13, the lowest fee increase in more than four decades. Forty-four percent of Bates students qualify for financial aid, and the college delivers financial aid packages that meet 100 percent of each student’s demonstrated need.

3. Mount David Summit offers display of student work, plus the plague

Multimedia coverage of the 2013 Mount David Summit. You know you’ve got a rocking academic event when the bubonic plague stops by, in person.

4. Bates Magazine, the pixel version

Just a reminder that Bates Magazine stories are always available online, including the Winter 2013 edition, with a new profile of Benjamin Mays ’20 — April 9 being the 45th anniversary of his eulogy for the slain Martin Luther King Jr. — plus photographs from three young alumni and the cover story about training your brain to handle what’s known as “eco-anxiety.”

5. Multimedia: Cultural collisions drive Kroepsch honoree Loring Danforth

Getting students to think like anthropologists, says Loring Danforth, winner of the 2013 Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching, means getting them to see and admit the cultural underpinnings of their beliefs and interests. Although the process “can be really agonizing” for students, Danforth says, the intensity means “you’re hitting on something really important and interesting.”

6. Sonja Pieck and her exploration of “the nexus of power and nature”

What is nature, who gets to decide its fate and why? And how can those who are excluded from environmental governance get some say? Sonja Pieck’s excellence in trying to answer those questions, through her teaching and her South America–focused research, is why she’s been promoted to associate professor of environmental studies, with tenure.

7. Audio slide show: Alpine skiers “race like you train, and train like you race”

Since winter seems to be hanging on for dear life, why not share this audio slide show, produced late in the ski season by photographer and videographer Michael Bradley, featuring Avril Dunleavy ’15 of Salt Lake City and Emily Bamford ’15 of East Melbourne, Australia talking about life as Bobcat alpine skier.

8. How men’s lacrosse is sticking with a winning formula

With a winning NESCAC record so far this spring, men’s lacrosse is something of a bookend to the other resurgent men’s sport in 2012-13, that being football and its 5-3 season last fall. Sports Information Director Andy Walter says success follows the familiar formula of combining something old and something new.

9. Bates in the News

Here in Maine, Doug Hodgkin, emeritus professor of political science, compares the attitudes of Maine voters who favor gun rights with those who favor gun control, and marine biologist Will Ambrose explains the biology and the sociology of a dispute between worm diggers and clam diggers. In Chicago, Postell Pringle ’98 is wowing audiences as Othello in a sizzling hip-hop adaptation of the play.

Greg Anderson, an assistant in instruction in biology, works with a student doing field work on a Brunswick mudflat of the kind that’s occasionally closed to clam harvesters for conservation reasons. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

Historic friction between two marine fisheries groups is playing out once again in Maine, where proposed legislation would give coastal towns the power to prohibit bloodworm digging in areas closed to clam harvesting.

Occasionally, a Maine town will close a flat to allow younger seed clams to mature. Currently, such closures doen’t apply to worm diggers.

The proposed legislation assumes that seeded flats need to be protected from both clam and worm digging, an assumption that riles worm diggers.

“Somebody is always trying to get us kicked out of their town,” said worm dealer Phil Harrington during a recent meeting in Brunswick to discuss the legislation.

Bates marine biologist Will Ambrose tends to side with the worm diggers, telling Bangor Daily News reporter Beth Brogan that the “impact worm digging has on clams has probably been overstated.”

Ambrose tells the BDN that according to his and his students’ research, not a lot of clams are “impacted to the point of death by worm digging.”

He also points to research by colleague and collaborator Brian Beal, a marine ecologist at the University of Maine, that specifically looks at how worm digging affects young clams. Beal concludes that “blood wormers should continue to harvest commercially from areas closed to shellfishing without reprisal or fear that they are causing damage to populations of juvenile soft-shell clams.”

“I’m surprised somebody hasn’t been shot over this.”

The hostility between the two digging groups, Ambrose adds, “goes back to at least 1979…because these groups do not mix, for a whole variety of reasons: socioeconomic, geopolitical — they just don’t get along. I’m surprised somebody hasn’t been shot over this.”

In 2005, environmental studies major Eben Sypitkowski ’05 spent time with worm diggers while doing his honors thesis on bloodworm digging.

He described for Bates Magazine the offbeat culture of the hardy yet disenfranchised worm diggers, and how there’s enviable talent in being able to “keep your butt to the wind and your hoe in the mud when your back is killing you.”

• View story from the Bangor Daily News, April 9, 2013

Professor Emeritus of Political Science Douglas Hodgkin. Photograph courtesy of the Androscoggin Historical Society.

With the Maine Legislature considering various gun control measures this session, the Kennebec Journal turns to Professor Emeritus of Political Science Douglas Hodgkin for insight into how voters treat lawmakers who do or don’t share their views on guns.

Hodgkin tells reporter Tom Bell that Mainers who support gun rights tend to cast their votes for candidates who share their views.

But gun control supporters aren’t as vigilant, says Hodgkin. They won’t punish lawmakers for voting what they consider to be the wrong way on the issue because, as Bell writes, “other issues are more important to them.

• View story from the Kennebec Journal, April 7, 2013.

After Whitten’s blog post recommended Slave to Sensation, there was a run on the romance novel at Maine libraries.

In its profile of Sarah Whitten ’94, recently named Librarian of the Year by the country’s romance writers, the Bangor Daily News explains the influence Whitten wields over Maine’s romance readers.

An active blogger for the Bangor Public Library blog Not Your Ordinary Book Banter — “for readers who love popular fiction, edgy and uncensored” — Whitten announced in February 2011 that Nalini Singh’s Slave to Sensation was the blog’s top vote-getter for book of the month.

Within 24 hours of her post, every copy in the state library system had been borrowed.

The organization Romance Writers of America recognized Whitten as Librarian of the Year for “making a significant online library presence supporting the romance genre.”

Whitten, a circulation assistant at Bangor Public Library who several years ago co-founded the library’s Not Your Ordinary Book Club, tells reporter Ardeana Hamlin that her interest in romance novels was “kept that under wraps” at Bates, when the literary genre was anything but appreciated.

“People would be surprised by how much romance novels have changed,” Whitten says. “No longer does a woe-is-me heroine need to be rescued by the hero. Heroines are much more independent, confident and strong.”

• View story from the April 3, 2013, Bangor Daily News

Cook served as the Big Green’s head coach for 12 years and posted an overall record of 106-74-31 while leading his squad to five Ivy League titles and seven NCAA Tournament appearances.

“It’s a strange day,” Cook tells the Valley News. “I’m not unhappy with any aspect of my job at Dartmouth and I don’t have any doubts about our success in coming years. It’s going to be very difficult and very emotional to leave Hanover and Dartmouth.”

Cook will be director of recruitment for the club’s youth academy. Cook’s hiring, as reported by The Goalkeeper blog at Philly.com, is part of a larger effort by the Union to strengthen its feeder program by joining the U.S. Soccer Development Academy.

“Players who become part of the Union’s academy structure will not have to pay anything to participate,” writes blogger Jonathan Tannenwald. “This is a big deal, for fairly obvious reasons.”

Jesse Laflamme ’00, manager of Pete & Gerry’s Organics, oversees an operation that’s the antithesis of factory farming. Hens live cage-free in open barns, lay their eggs where they wish, and have outdoor access. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

A story posted on MSN’s portal for small businesses and entrepreneurs, Business on Main, includes Pete & Gerry’s Organics, the family egg business managed by Jesse Laflamme ’00.

Under the headline “Businesses find benefits in going green,” writer Joanna Krotz notes that “Pete and Gerry’s, located in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, is a regional powerhouse, distributing ‘certified humane’ organic eggs up and down the East Coast.”

Laflamme says compound annual growth is at 35 percent, “with revenue north of $50 million.” He also works to support family farms by partnering with 40 or so neighbors, some of whom switched to egg production after the success of Pete and Gerry’s.

• View story from MSN’s Business on Main

Will a week in the wild prepare you for Bates? Right after their AESOP pre-orientation trips returned to campus Aug. 31, and with traces of untamed Maine still upon them, these first-years posed for photographer Phyllis Graber Jensen. They returned with pots, pads and even some leftover pasta sauce — not to mention new skills, freedoms and friends.

Winter 2013 Bates Magazine cover photograph by Will Ash.

The cover of the Winter 2013 issue features a photo of grass tendrils poking out from the snow at Bates–Morse Mountain Conservation Area.

The image, by photographer Will Ash, is among several dozen published in the book Between Two Rivers: A Year at Bates–Morse Mountain.

The photograph invites readers to the essay “Beauty and the Brain” by Laura Sewall, director of Bates–Morse Mountain and a pioneer in the field of ecopsychology.