But who coined the phrase? Turns out that Reunion Weekend was the perfect time to find out.

Darby Ray

In a Q-and-A, Sun Journal reporter Kathryn Skelton asks Darby Ray, director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, “If you were a student, what project through the Harward Center makes you think, ‘I’d be all over that’”?

Ray’s answer pointed to a partnership with an elementary school about a mile from campus.

“Last semester one of the education classes at Bates met all semester long at Farwell Elementary School. The students and professor didn’t just visit the school once or twice — they actually held their college course at the elementary school, which enabled an amazing reciprocity of knowledge, insight and energy.

“I love that kind of creative exchange.”

• View story in the May 19, 2013, Sun Journal.

Psychologist Jonathan Adler ’00 talks with Kati Vecsey of the theater department during his lecture at Bates in 2008. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

“Remember, one of the primary reasons we have emotions in the first place is to help us evaluate our experiences,” says Adler, an assistant professor of psychology at Olin College.

Rodriguez describes how Adler and a colleague investigated the link between mixed emotional experience and psychological welfare in a group of people undergoing 12 sessions of psychotherapy.

Participants who said they felt cheerful and dejected at the same time (for example, by expressing the notion that “I feel sad at times because of everything I’ve been through, but I’m also happy and hopeful because I’m working through my issues”) preceded improvements in their sense of well-being.

“Taking the good and the bad together may detoxify the bad experiences, allowing you to make meaning out of them in a way that supports psychological well-being,” the researchers found.

• View story from Scientific American

Kinney, a Bates trustee for 27 years, including 17 as chair, 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.

As a corporate leader, he said that he took the advice of a business mentor back in Bar Harbor, Maine, by throwing himself into service to the nonprofit world, especially to Bates.

As Kinney received a Bates honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1985, then-President Hedley Reynolds lauded him for being “always thoughtful for the needs of others, always ready to serve, always ready with a helping hand.”

Born in Burnham, Maine, and raised in Pittsfield, Kinney was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate who earned money for college by working and living in the home of Lewiston mill industrialist Scott Libbey Sr.

Kinney received $500 in scholarships from Bates. At the time of his death, he was the college’s most generous living donor.

He also received about $500 in scholarship support from Bates, prompting Kinney to tell Dean of the College Harry Rowe, at graduation, that “I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’ll try to pay you back the scholarship money.”

At the time of his death, he was the college’s most generous living donor.

In 1942 while doing a Works Projects Administration study along the Maine coast, Kinney approached Matthew Highlands, a legendary University of Maine food scientist, with a crab question. Crabs could be had for a penny each — lobstermen were just tossing them from their traps — so could anything be done with them?

“You can cook them, process them and put them in hermetically sealed cans,” Highlands said. With World War II interrupting the supply of crab meat from Japan, the demand was rising.

Kinney learned the business at home, a few cans at a time. By the 1950s his North Atlantic Packing Co. was a $2 million-a-year business selling canned crab and other products and employing 400 in Bar Harbor.

Kinney then joined Gorton’s. For a society more and more eager for convenience, Kinney again used emerging food technology to lead Gorton’s to expand its frozen, ready-to-cook fish products, including the iconic fish stick and, by the 1960s, the fish for McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish.

Under Kinney, Gorton’s earnings went from $122,000 on sales of $12.1 million in 1958 to $1.44 million on sales of $71.9 million in 1968.

In 1973, he took the helm of General Mills, which had acquired Gorton’s in 1968. He served as CEO of IDS Mutual Fund Group in the 1980s.

A “compelling example that commitment to the common weal is the indelible mark of liberal learning.”

At Commencement 1985, when he received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Bates, then-Dean of the College Carl Benton Straub praised Kinney for “his compelling example that commitment to the common weal is the indelible mark of liberal learning.”

In 2008, Kinney received the college’s Benjamin Elijah Mays Medal, awarded for distinguished service to Bates and the larger community worldwide, and in 2005 he was a charter inductee into the Benjamin Bates Society, an honor accorded the college’s leading philanthropists.

Kinney provided major support for Pettengill Hall (1999), was instrumental in securing foundation grant funding for the Olin Arts Center (1986) and established an endowed professorship in history and a scholarship fund.

In Minnesota, Kinney served as a director of the Minnesota Symphony, the Guthrie Theater and the YMCA, among many others.

The commitment that I’ve had, emotionally and monetarily, was focused on Bates.”

Elsewhere in Maine, his support and service went many nonprofits, including the Bangor Theological Seminary, Maine Central Institute, Friends of Acadia National Park and The Jackson Laboratory. His Maine corporate board service included Hannaford Bros. Co., IDEXX Laboratories and Unum.

When Kinney offered his oral history to Bates’ Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library in 2005, he explained how a business mentor in Bar Harbor, a banker, encouraged him to make one or two meaningful commitments to organizations outside of business.

“The commitment that I’ve had, emotionally and monetarily, was focused on Bates,” Kinney said.

Kinney is also credited with significant reform of the Bates Board of Trustees in the 1980s when he introduced a resolution that mandated trustee retirement at age 70.

As he said in his oral history, “As smart as some people are when they’re 75 or 80 or whatever they may be…on the average you’ve got to have younger people. They stimulate the thinking…you want to renew, you need new blood.”

With support from the late U.S. Sen. Edmund Muskie ’36, among other trustees, the resolution was approved.

“Youth will keep the organization healthy,” said Kinney, who backed up that idea by mentoring at least two generations of young business leaders in Maine.

Kinney is survived by his wife, Margaret (Margee) Kinney; daughters Jeanie Small and Isabella Keating; stepdaughter Lucy Thatcher Penfield; stepson Ford Thatcher; seven grandchildren, including Samantha Kinney Leone ’93; two step- grandchildren; 10 great-grandchildren; and his sister, Elizabeth Kinney Jones ’44. He was predeceased by his son, E. Robert Kinney Jr. ’70, who is survived by his widow, Sally Greenlaw Kinney ’69.

His memorial service is at 4 p.m. on Friday May 17 at Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis.

Pat Foley ’04 during his Bates playing days.

Reporter Brandon Hall of ESPN Boston offers a brief Q-and-A with Pat Foley ’04, former All-NESCAC linebacker who is the new head coach at the Brooks School, where the program has won one game since 2010.

The past isn’t prologue, Foley tells Hall. “Between now and when I get on the practice field for the first time, I’m not gonna put too much weight on the past, and see how the guys do moving forward.”

Foley takes the position at Brooks, in North Andover, Mass., after four years as co-defensive coordinator at Colgate University.

He’s leaving college football coaching because he wants “to be more involved with other aspects of kids lives” outside football. “At the college level, it got to a point where the only interaction I had with kids was on the football side…. At Brooks, I’ll be more involved in other aspects of their lives.”

• View story from April 1, 2013, ESPNBoston.com

Senior Lecturer in English Robert Farnsworth congratulates Ashley Lepre ’13 after the annual creative writing thesis reading at Mount David Summit on March 29, 2013. Photographs by Jay Burns.

For Rob Farnsworth, who advises Bates’ creative writing students along with English department colleague and novelist Jessica Anthony ’96, spring arrives on Mount David Summit day, the annual academic festival of, in Farnsworth’s words, “student research, scholarship, analysis, composition, performance — you name it.”

“It’s my favorite event,” he added.

“Serious and deeply attentive discipline.”

Spring being all about rebirth writ large, the interplay of spring, the Summit and the creative work produced by student writers was also on Farnsworth’s mind.

A creative writing thesis “involves serious and deeply attentive discipline,” he said. “The experience offers those who undertake such projects a first experience in the practical and emotional challenges that the work of writing presents to anyone who seriously commits to it.”

Please note that some readings contain strong language.

Ashley Brunk ’13

Ashley Brunk ’13

Brunk, of Phoenix, Ariz., reads from her fiction thesis, “Sheila’s Heart.”

In the reading, the protagonist is Sheila, who in high school received a heart transplant and is now a senior in college.

Sheila helped to organize a buddy program called Big One, LIttle One, and her buddy in the program is Jessica, who has the congenital spinal cord condition spina bifada.

Other characters are Mark and Robbie, a buddy pair that Sheila and Jessica recently met; Coop, Sheila’s doctor; and Professor Doerer, faculty adviser for the buddy program; and Caitlin, one of Sheila’s friends.

Eryn Gilchrist ’13

Gilchrist of West Simsbury, Conn., reads from her fiction thesis, “The Sharpening of Carlton Beavers.”

Eryn Gilchrist ’13

In the reading, the protagonist is Carlton Beavers, who is on a bus that’s traveling from New Oreans to El Paso. He’s sitting next to “the worst person you can get stuck next to on a bus,” says Gilchrist.

That man is named Marvin Deckler, and he’s “very large, very opinionated, and the only carry-on he has is a megaphone. And, he speaks almost exclusively in very bad puns.”

Joanna Harran ’13

Joanna Harran ’13

Harran, of Pukalani, Hawaii, reads three poems, two of which explore places in her native state.

“Plumeria Graves” is about Keawala’i Church, a small stone building on the island of Maui, represents the blending of traditional Hawaiian polytheism with monotheism brought by Christian missionaries, explains Harran. Today, the church conducts services in Hawaiian, and is famed for its beautiful flowers, grounds and ocean views, and its distinctive, traditional Hawaiian stone graves.

“New Woman” is about a woman trying to find a place in a family as she navigates a relationships with a man whose wife has recently died.

“Paths” is set on the small Hawaiian island of Kaho’olawe. Used as a U.S. bombing range during World War II, the island today is littered with debris and unexploded ordnance.

During ancient times, Kaho’olawe was sacred land, used only for religious ceremonies and to train seafaring Polynesians how to use the stars for navigation. Still uninhabited today, Kaho’olawe is the focus of strategies to control erosion and re-establish vegetation.

Mollie Kervick ’13

Mollie Kervick ’13

Kervick, of Windsor Locks, Conn., reads five poems.

Her poetry, she says, asks explores the weaving of myth and family heritage. In the process, it asks and answers the question “How do I ground myself?” The act of writing, she concludes, “gives me a cultural context — something for me to grab on to.”

“Rose Anne Helferty” is based on a story that Kervick once heard about a relative named Rose Anne Helferty.

“The Death of Snowflake” is a poem written for Kervick’s older sister.

“On the Way to the Franciscan Well” is set in Ireland, where Kervick studied last year. Her father was visiting her, and “on the way to the pub, we heard a splash, and saw this beautiful object in the river.”

“A Boy Who Died in Cork” is about “someone I felt connected to, but never met,” she says.

“Winter at 30 Elm Street” is about her home in Windsor Locks, the town where she, her father, and her grandfather grew up in. “It’s the hub of many childhood memories,” she says. “What I’ve learned about writing is how strange and scary memories can be, and what sticks out.

Ashley Lepre ’13

Ashley Lepre ’13

Lepre, of Fairfield, Conn., delivered a selection of poems chock full of smart wit.

“The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow”is from a series of ‘Where Are They Now?” poems about the fates of well-known fictional characters, this one muses about Orphan Annie’s potential career choices.

“This Be Worse” is a parody of a Phllip Larkin poem about parenting, “This Be the Verse.” Lepre reads Larkin’s original, then her parody, “This Be Worse.”

“The Bachelor: A Villanelle,” written in the 19-line villanelle format, is about the TV show The Bachelor. (Catch Lepre’s theme? So far, poems about orphans, bad parenting and dicey relationships.)

“The Brat” is a meditation on how a woman grow up to be a pitiable character on a reality show like The Bachelor or The Bachelorette? Maybe it happens like this.

Haiku featuring boiling pots, a dyslexic groomsman, poor mistletoe placement and wishing upon a star.

In this video clip, Lepre reads two haiku:

“The Way They Please”captures “a lot of how I feel about people and a lot of things in the world and a lot of parts of myself.”

Matt Williams ’13

Matt Williams ’13

Williams, of Clarksville, Md., reads a selection of creative nonfiction about his encounters with writers, including the poet Eileen Myles, titled “Eileen Myles, This Is Why I Love You.”

Williams is an American cultural studies major who is, in a sense, on loan from his major program.

He’s pursuing a creative writing thesis because he wants to confront and investigate his own subjectivity in his writing.

“The goal is to explicitly place myself as the author as well as a participant in my stories, confronting my own subjectivity through the use of ‘I.’”

Catherine Djang ’13 and Ben Smith ’13 are the first Bates debaters to “break” at the World Universities Debating Championship since 1999. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

They were in Berlin, in a big meeting room at Technische Universität along with 384 of the world’s best debate teams.

After nine grueling preliminary debates over the prior three days, the debaters were listening to the slow roll call of teams that had earned enough points to “break” into the 48-team elimination rounds of the World Universities Debating Championship, held Dec. 27 through Jan. 4.

Forty-four teams had already been announced.

Just four spots remained.

No Bates team had advanced since 1999.

Then came the sweet words from the front of the room: “Breaking 45th, on 18 points: Bates A.”

A few minutes later, Djang was shaking, mostly because a fellow Bates debater had just grabbed her shoulders. “Do you know what this means!?” exclaimed Taylor Blackburn ’15.

“Do you know what this means for Bates!?” continued Blackburn. “Do you know what this means for you!?”

What “this” means is this: Djang and Smith are now “among the elite of elite of global debaters,” says Director of Debate and Lecturer in Rhetoric Jan Hovden, who served as a judge in Berlin, as did Blackburn. (Adding to the Bates presence at this year’s WUDC was Colin Etnire ’12, who was selected as one of nine judges of the Grand Final, won by Monash University.)

Breaking at the WUDC is one of those feats that’s more impressive the more you learn about it. For one thing, they are the first Bates team to break since Tamara Pogue Drangstveit ’99 and Amy Keith ’99 did the trick their senior year.

“Not many people realize how big an achievement this really is,” says Drangstveit, who now directs the Family & Intercultural Resource Center in Summit County, Colo. ”The tournament is really the Olympics of international spoken and analytic competition.”

The numbers support what she says.

Djang advances her team’s argument during a World Universities Debating Championship match as teammate Ben Smith ’13 watches.

This year, those 384 teams came from 264 colleges, universities and debating societies in 64 countries, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Once featuring mostly teams from England and Australia, WUDC is now more worldwide and competitive than ever, and this year’s field was about double that of a decade ago.

“You can be in a room with people representing every continent except Antarctica,” says Hovden.

Djang and Smith’s feat gains even more luster when you learn that Americans have no edge in international debating (Bates’ long history of international debate notwithstanding). A handful of English and Australian colleges dominate: “Oxford and Cambridge, Sydney and Monash,” recites Hovden.

International debaters tend to be vastly more experienced, nearly professional. As Smith says wryly, “We’re not as good.” International debaters are often law students or Ph.D. candidates. “It can be intimidating.”

Even at home, Bates debate walks a distinctive path, as most other colleges have tryouts and cuts; Bates never has.

Of the 33 U.S. colleges and universities that sent 53 teams to Berlin, only nine teams made the break: Bates, Stanford, Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Not making the cut were U.S. teams from Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Swarthmore, Amherst, and Williams, among others.

Djang and Smith confer as a McGill University debater presents the Opposition argument during a preliminary round of the 2013 World Universities Debates Championship. Bates argued the Government position with Australia’s Griffith University, while McGill was paired with Durham Union Society of England.

Americans are also at a disadvantage at the WUDC because U.S. parliamentary style differs from the British style employed at most world tournaments.

American style features one team (the Government) supporting the motion, and the other team (the Opposition) against. British parliamentary style doubles the fun. Two teams are on each side of the motion, each team getting a chance to support or oppose the motion.

For example, in one of their debates, Smith and Djang, along with a team from Australia’s Griffith University, were the Government, supporting the motion that “universities should never prohibit research or teaching on the grounds of sexist, racist or otherwise discriminatory implications.” The Opposition teams were from Canada’s McGill University and Durham Union Society of England.

“The British style is a lot more competitive,” Smith says. “It’s more exciting, and there’s a lot more strategy.”

Breaking at worlds puts Djang and Smith “among the elite of elite of global students,” says Director of Debate and Lecturer in Rhetoric Jan Hovden. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

Hovden explains that the two styles reflect “different argumentative communities.” That is, “the way you might argue in a court of criminal law is different from civil law. How you are argue with the person on the street differs from how you argue” in the academic realm.

Given the complexity of the format, it’s imperative for a team to keep track of all arguments, then wisely choose which ones to argue. You simply can’t argue them all.

“You have to identify the really critical arguments of the debate and use them to your advantage,” Smith says.

This ability, taught to Smith and Djang by their coach, Jan Hovden, is also what debate alumnus Erich Fuchs ’92 learned from the late Bob Branham, the coach who completed the Bates program’s  shift from policy debate to the more freewheeling parliamentary style by 1990.

Fuchs, now on the faculty in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State, recalls how Branham would “caution against simply refuting each argument separately” during a parliamentary debate, even as he taught his debaters to track the many different arguments carefully.

Branham “recommended developing perspective on the entire debate, then developing a few carefully selected responses or incisive points of information,” Fuchs says.

“Points of information” are occasions when a side can question the other. “Because there can be several people asking you questions, you can get bombarded,” Smith said. “But it’s more fun that way.”

All told, being an underdog at a world-level event suited the Bates team just fine. Like any competitor who relishes the arena, Djang and Smith savored the chance to “play up.”

“There’s greater pressure to perform, but we like that,” Djang said. “The different knowledge backgrounds, different educational backgrounds — it’s exciting on so many levels.”

In at least one instance, the Bates team used its academic coursework for effect.

Catherine Djang ’13 and Ben Smith ’13 ponder a question as they pose for photographs near the debate trophy case in Pettigrew Hall. Photo by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

In the fifth preliminary round, Djang and Smith argued the Government side on the motion that progressive males “of dominant ethnicities” should refrain from taking jobs when there is a qualified candidate from a “historically disadvantaged group.”

A politics major (with minors in philosophy and Spanish) whose senior thesis looks at the underrepresentation of women in politics, Djang, who goes by “Cat,” pounced.

“I was able to easily articulate a justification for why it is important to consider historical marginalization and access to positions of power,” she said.

Of course, a debate motion can just as easily clash with a debater’s set of beliefs. (Case in point: Smith, being a self-described progressive male, had less zeal for the motion.)

Specific motions aside, the overall experience at an event like the WUDC, where debaters might argue more than a dozen motions over a few days — on sensitive topics ranging from nuclear weapons and aid to Egypt to feminism, monogamy, religious intolerance and population control — is enough to jostle anyone’s beliefs.

“You go into a debate and you realize that your strongly held opinions are matched by strong opinions on the other side, with very valid arguments to support them,” Smith acknowledges. “You can lose track of what you yourself believe.”

But, says Hovden, offering her students a path out of this rhetorical rabbit hole, by arguing a position that you don’t believe, “students to gain a better understanding of the issue as a whole.”

In turn, understanding an issue is the first step toward testing one’s own beliefs, a basic tenet of a liberal arts education. From that test comes greater respect for the positions of others.

“Ultimately,” Hovden says, completing her own neat argument, “that makes the student a stronger and more empathetic individual.”

In this Globe video, McGrory, a native of Weymouth, Mass., and a 23-year veteran of the paper, describes his lifetime love of newspapers and his hopes for the Globe. McGrory succeeds Marty Baron, now executive editor of The Washington Post.

For media observers, the first two months of McGrory’s editorship have been a microcosm of newspaper challenges in the 21st century.

Andrew Beaujon, who reported on McGrory’s appointment in Poynter‘s MediaWire in December, did a followup interview in which McGrory discussed the challenge of untangling the Globe’s paywalled BostonGlobe.com presence from its free site, Boston.com.

In mid-February came the announcement that the Globe’s parent company, The New York Times, will explore selling the Globe, which it has owned for 20 years.

A political science major at Bates, McGrory was a Bates Student reporter, news editor and features editor. He did special reports on sexism in academia, alcohol issues on campus and residential life program, among other issues.

In 1983, he reported a significant campus story of the decade, a student protest against military recruiters on campus due to the ban on gays in military.

Called Belcampo, it is “not just an interesting company, [but a] potentially an important one,” writes Richard Bradley.

“It aims to manage its land and animals in a sustainable fashion, using best practices typically only used by much smaller farms that find turning a profit an ongoing challenge. No agribusiness has ever tried this experiment on such a large scale, much less in three countries simultaneously.”

The company began with land, and lots of it, that Robinson bought in the three countries after selling his company, Linsco Private Ledger Corp., in 2005 and turning his attention to food and farming, two passions born from visits to his grandparents’ Maine farm as a child.

“Eco-friendly but moneymaking.”

At first, Robinson simply wanted to “rehab some pastures [and] make some good food” while trying to break even. After rejecting various ideas to make the venture financially viable (such as eco-marinas or a fertilizer-free golf course), he began searching for someone who knew how, in Bradley’s words, “to transform empty farmland into an eco-friendly but moneymaking property.”

That led him to Belcampo’s current CEO, Anya Fernald, founder of the food consultancy Live Culture and named in 2010 as one of The New York Times “Nifty 50″ up-and-coming American talents.

“Belcampo is a big bet,” James Freeman, founder of Blue Bottle Coffee, tells Bradley. “It’s a breathtakingly complex thing.”

• View story from Worth

The Oregonian newspaper, in its profile of Your Brandlive, co-founded by Fritz Brumder ’01, describes the Web application as a “tool that allows retailers to reach consumers through live video chats akin to Home Shopping Network or QVC events.”

Your BrandLIve founder Fritz Brumder ’01 discusses his web application on a “Meet the Startup” interview in Portland, Ore.

Consumers can pose questions from their computers directly to the retailer, who in turn can direct a pitch or demonstration to a captive audience.

“Retailing and shopping by nature is a person-to-person, social process,” says Brumder, an interdisciplinary major in film and video production at Bates.

“While the Web has given us tools to sell and merchandise and make it utilitarian, I think human nature is about putting people in front of people and have them interact around a product or market.”

“If I could Skype or Facetime with a retailer, would I like that?”

Reporter D.K. Rowe quotes brand manager Andy Meyer of the outdoor outfitter Marmot, which is among 45 clients using Your Brandlive. Meyer offers this litmus test for using Your Brandlive: “If a consumer asks: ‘If I could Skype or Facetime with a retailer, would I like that?’ If the answer is yes, then they’d like the Your Brandlive experience.”

• View story from the Oregonian, Feb. 11, 2013,