George Mitchell, the former U.S. senator who served as President Obama’s special envoy for Middle East peace until last spring, delivers the keynote address during a weeklong celebration of international and interdisciplinary education at Bates in October.

Mitchell speaks at 5:15 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 27, in the Bates College Chapel, 275 College St. His talk follows the dedication of Hedge and Roger Williams halls, recently renovated by the college into academic facilities that are advancing the Bates education still further across national and interdisciplinary boundaries.

Visit the Open to the World website.
More about the Hedge and Roger Williams renovations.
More about the speakers .

During the 4:15 p.m. dedication, Paul Marks ’83, chairman and CEO of the aerospace materials maker Argosy International Inc., offers remarks about living as a global citizen. Mitchell’s talk and the dedication of Hedge and Roger Williams halls culminate Open to the World: Bates Celebrates Unbounded Learning, the Oct. 24-28 series of events.

The week’s speakers also include Gary Hirshberg P’13, “CE-Yo” of yogurt maker Stonyfield Farm. The full Open to the World schedule will be announced later in October. For more information, please contact 207-786-6336 or arichard@bates.edu.

Here are events that have been confirmed to date:

Monday, Oct. 24: Bates observes United Nations Day.

Tuesday, Oct. 25: Translations: Bates International Poetry Festival opens with a 4 p.m. welcome, readings by international poets at 4:45 accompanied by English translations, and an evening reception at 6, all in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

This five-day event includes poets from around the world presenting their work, accompanied by translations created by Bates faculty and students; and a conference on the art and practice of translation. For more information, please contact gdumais@bates.edu or 207-786-8293.

Wednesday, Oct. 26: At 6 p.m. is a screening of Food, Inc., the Academy Award-nominated documentary exposing the corporate-controlled, industrialized underside of American food production. Following the screening at 7:30 p.m., Hirshberg, a prominent figure in Robert Kenner’s 2008 film, offers remarks. Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Thursday, Oct. 27: Hedge and Roger Williams halls are rededicated at 4:30, followed by Mitchell’s keynote. The keynote will be simulcast in Perry Atrium, Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk). A reception in the atrium follows Mitchell’s speech.

Friday, Oct. 28: In “Global Possibilities,” five young Bates alums discuss their experiences with initiatives that have both local and global consequences; at 4 p.m. in the Keck Classroom (G52), Pettengill Hall.

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the final days of the renovation of Hedge and Roger Williams halls.

On Monday, June 27, faculty in philosophy, religious studies and environmental studies will receive key-card access to the renovated Hedge Hall and be able to start settling into their spiffy new offices. ES will occupy the first floor, religious studies the second and philosophy the third.

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In both cases, explains project manager Paul Farnsworth, the buildings will remain off-limits to the remainder of the campus community for some time yet. “The spaces still won’t be schedulable” through the online R25 room-reservation system, he explains, and general contractor Wright-Ryan Construction will still be around. “It makes life difficult for the contractor if there are people in the building while he’s trying to finish things.”

Still, installing Bates inhabitants has to be one of the final milestones. The timetable is especially tight for the Roger Bill’s occupants, Farnsworth adds, because their former digs in Hathorn Hall are scheduled for
sprucing up, too.

At Hedge, the punch-list process rolls on, as the general contractor and then the architect inspect what’s been finished and flag things that fall short. As for new construction, there’s precious little left: expansion joints on the roof and between the new and old sections of the building and some flooring here and there — notably on the ground floor, where dampness in the floor slab has forced a change in plan.

Bates is committed to using construction products that don’t emit toxic vapors, which means that the flooring adhesive is a benign water-based product. But it needs a dry surface to stay stuck, so a water barrier needs to be laid over the ground floor concrete
to keep the moisture at bay.

Meanwhile, moving day looms ever larger. “I just took the classroom committee through the building,” Farnsworth says. “These are people who deal with room scheduling, and we walked them through so they can get a visual on the spaces.”

Previously, we had asked Farnsworth what Commencement visitors could expect to see on the construction site. This time around, unable to let go of a good premise for a question, we wondered what would greet alums and families returning for Reunion, just days away.

One thing that will greet them is the opportunity to tour both buildings, at 11 a.m. Friday, and 1:30 and 4 p.m. Saturday. Tour groups will meet up outside the main entrance of Hedge on Alumni Walk.

For passers-by, meanwhile, there won’t be anything as dramatic as the instant lawn that materialized around Hedge Hall during Senior Week. In fact, Farnsworth says, the construction fence will stay up around the Bill and no grounds work will take place till after Reunion. The continuing need for cherry pickers on the site necessitates both those conditions.

Aside from landscaping, though, the Bill will show marked progress since just late May. On the outside, the roofing slates will likely all be in place, and workers should be nearly done installing the dark-gray ContinentalBronze sheet metal on the walls of dormers and other non-brick faces.

Inside, drywall is virtually finished, with the stairwell inside the new addition being the last stand for the wallboard hangers. Plenty of primer paint has been splashed around, too, and the first color coats have been applied through much of the building. Ceiling grids are going up and ceiling systems being installed — lights, sprinkler heads, etc.

“The pace of work has greatly accelerated” at the Bill because of experience gained at Hedge, Farnsworth says. “A lot of the questions that were unique to the installation here at Bates, we’ve answered in doing Hedge. So people don’t need additional instruction, they just march on.”

Can we talk? Campus Construction Update welcomes your questions, reminiscences and comments about campus improvements. Please e-mail staff writer Doug Hubley at dhubley@bates.edu, stating “Construction Update” in the subject line.

Note: Campus Construction Update returns the first week of July.

The two students of Russian began their Mount David Summit panel presentation with a black-and-white photograph showing the open casket of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova surrounded by mourners, including a visibly distraught Joseph Brodsky, a poet she had famously mentored.

In one of the 2011 summit’s many panel presentations, Nora Murray ’12 and Andrew Wilcox ’11 drew on powerful works by the two acclaimed Russian poets to explain the “Sights, Sounds and Sense of Russian Poetry.”

The session, held in a Pettengill Hall classroom filled with fellow students, faculty, staff and friends, was moderated by Associate Professor of Russian Dennis Browne.

Wilcox examined Brodsky (1940-1996) , while Murray focused on Akhmatova (1889-1966).

Eeach read poems in the original Russian, showing how the sounds of a language — whether spoken or heard simply within one’s head while reading — contribute to the poem’s impact.

Murray pointed out, for instance, how the long pronunciation of the letter “o,” repeated throughout the Russian version of Akhmatova’s “The Last Toast,” strongly reinforces the mordant feeling of this meditation on the dissolution of one of Akhmatova’s three marriages.

They also read English translations, including their own, of the same works, revealing the audience how translations of the same piece can vary widely.

Both discussed, during the presentation and in response to questions afterward, the challenges and joys of translation, pointing out how much of the result depends on the intention as well as the skill of the translator.

While some translators aim to render a virtually literal, word-for-word representation in another language, even if that sacrifices some of the meaning, others seek to virtually create a new work that is their own as much as the original writer’s, a fact that prompted Wilcox to note that Brodsky tightly controlled translations of his poetry when he was alive.

As Bates continues to transform two 19th-century residence halls into state-of-the-art academic buildings, the college has received a $150,000 grant from the George I. Alden Trust to support the renovation project.
The grant supports the $15 million expansion and renovation of Hedge Hall, built in 1890, and nearby Roger Williams Hall (1895) into homes for academic departments and programs. The Alden Trust, established by George Alden in 1912, supports learning institutions that demonstrate educational excellence, exciting programming and effective administration.

“We are deeply grateful for this support from the Alden Trust,” says Bates President Elaine Tuttle Hansen.

“It’s a validation of our belief in the important role that the built environment can and should play in the liberal arts experience. These renovations are more than mere facelifts — they support a number of educational priorities at Bates,” Hansen says.

The new spaces are designed to bring faculty and students together both formally, in classes, and informally in lounge and common spaces,” she explains. “This supports our belief that significant learning happens as much in the social arena as in classroom and lab.”

In addition, she says, “Bates’ nationally recognized commitment to sustainability is prominently reflected in the Hedge-Williams project,” which, like all new major construction at the college, conforms to the equivalent of the “silver” rating in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) system of standards.

Finally, by providing new focuses for activity and stunning new visuals at the east end of a major college thoroughfare, the Hedge-Williams project continues the redefinition of the central Bates campus.

“Foundation funding for infrastructure and capital projects has become increasingly rare,” notes Susan Orton, director of foundation, corporate and government relations. “The Alden Trust understands this, and that’s why this grant is particularly meaningful to all of us at Bates.”

The nationally known design firm JSA, with offices in Jacksonville, Fla., and Portsmouth, N.H., did the architectural work for the renovations.

Designed by noted architect G.M. Coombs as a chemistry lab, Hedge Hall was converted into a student residence in 1965. In its return to academic service, it will house the Program in Environmental Studies and the departments of religious studies and philosophy. Currently at 14,764 square feet, the building will gain nearly 5,200 square feet in the renovation, including a major addition.

Roger Williams Hall, designed by Lewiston architect Elmer Thomas, opened in 1895 as the home of Cobb Divinity School at Bates. It was converted to combined residential and administrative use in 1908, becoming fully residential around 1964.

Expanding from about 27,300 square feet to more than 34,000, the hall will house the departments of German and Russian studies and of romance languages and literatures; the Program in Asian Studies; the Language Resource Center; and the Off-Campus Study Office.

Begun in March 2010, the Hedge-Williams project is the fourth and final undertaking of the first phase of Bates’ campus facilities master plan, which also produced a new residence on College Street; the New Dining Commons, on Central Avenue; and the pedestrian boulevard on campus called Alumni Walk.

Anticipated completion date is summer 2011. The Hedge-Williams project also represents a significant act of historic and architectural preservation, as these buildings, constructed within the college’s first 50 years of existence, help tell the early history of Bates.

Hedge and Roger Williams will feature spacious facilities that combine classrooms, lounges, offices and common areas to create intellectually stimulating and emotionally nurturing spaces for students and faculty to come together.

The departments and programs moving to Hedge were previously located away from the center of campus in small wooden buildings. The new location in Hedge will promote easier collaboration and camaraderie both among them and with other disciplines in nearby buildings. Aesthetic additions include new dormer and first-floor windows and a new staircase entrance with a glassed-in stairway that will present an inviting view for passers-by on Alumni Walk.

Among distinctive new features in Roger Williams Hall (familiarly known on campus as “Roger Bill” or “the Bill”) is a “cultural kitchen.” New dormers, an addition behind the building and a glass-metal stair tower will transform the exterior.

Hedge and Roger Williams will be 35 percent more energy-efficient than required by ASTM International, a major standards-development organization. “Green” building tactics include hydronic, or water-based, heating and cooling systems; Web-based processes for measuring and verifying energy use; the recycling of construction waste materials; low-flow water fixtures; and motorized windows for automatic ventilation and mitigation of solar warmth gains.

How a tradition of learning inside, outside, and around the classroom influences Bates facilities growth

By President Elaine Tuttle Hansen

The unstaged photograph below shows history professor Hilmar Jensen and his honors thesis advisees, Ariela Silberstein ’10 and Anthony Phillips ’10, enjoying late-night ice cream in their Pettengill Hall history lounge amidst the implements of their academic trade — computers, texts, a cell phone, Diet Coke, and some Chex Mix.

Through the photo, we feel the energetic blend of old tools and new approaches. We appreciate the complex process that fuels the scholar’s mind and body, and the way that academic work connects to external sources and destinations across space and time.

The sight of Bates learners and teachers in dialogue is familiar to us, yet it captures an intentional educational ideal — one that privileges a rich mix of study and interaction — 155 years in the making here at Bates.

While reputed to be utterly demanding, Bates’ earliest professors welcomed students to their homes (sometimes by necessity, for those who didn’t have campus offices) with a style that George Millet Chase, son of President Chase, once described as relentlessly “simple and informal.”

As they guided each new generation of students, the earliest faculty also seemed to embrace the concept of a changing world. It was said of philosopher, theologian, and botanist Benjamin Francis Hayes that his “doctrine never petrified.”

Quaint as such language sounds today, that approach — meet students where they are, then carefully push them further than they imagined possible — is still alive and formative.

Take the renovation and expansion of Hedge and Roger Williams halls, for example. By fall 2011, each will offer thoughtful juxtapositions and intersections of classrooms, lounges, offices, and common spaces where students and faculty will meet formally and informally. Inside, outside, and around the classroom, they will learn with and from each other.

Moreover, the denizens of our newest academic buildings reflect our long resistance to fragmentation and factionalization.

Hedge will house the religious studies and philosophy departments as well as the environmental studies program — and we’re not yet tired of joking about a building that embraces “heaven and earth” on just three floors. In doing so, Hedge brings together the Western academy’s oldest disciplines with one of the newest, future-oriented, and global “interdisciplines,” an arrangement that embodies an important theme of liberal arts colleges in the 21st century.

Whereas the earliest colleges and universities trained clerics in religion and philosophy in order to save our eternal souls, today these institutions promote research and problem-solving — by humanists, artists, social scientists, and natural scientists — who work across traditional boundaries to improve life on this endangered planet.

Meanwhile, the Bill welcomes our non-English-language study programs as well as the technology-rich Language Resource Center and the Off-Campus Study Office. Among our peers, only Bates has gathered under one roof the programs that teach and practice the cross-cultural competence that our students and our world need today.

The faculty and students working within the Bill will, in effect, extend the reach of Bates as they learn to transcend some of the boundaries that divide and endanger us. They will look outward through multiple cultural lenses and use, quite literally, different words to describe, understand, and design solutions for the world’s common problems.

Like the initiatives outlined in our academic plan, “Choices for Bates,” our facilities improvements will continue to encourage learners and teachers to cross paths, challenge boundaries, and connect and collaborate.

And this brings us back to the deceptively casual scene of a professor and his students, 155 years in the making.

In a Bates classroom, author Denis Sweet, professor of German, is lost in "unthought."

It was Short Term 2008, the debut of my course, “Wake Up!” The rain was pouring down in the woods of southwestern Massachusetts, pattering hard on the blue tarp that I was crouched under.

It had been pouring rain like this all day. And it was cold. I hadn’t eaten, or rather, I had deliberately not eaten. I was fasting from dawn to dawn. I had put on all my clothes, including the rain gear, and had crawled into the sleeping bag to try to fend off the cold (but not to sleep; the point was to keep watch through the night and greet the first light of dawn). But every hour or so, I would struggle out of the sleeping bag and methodically peel off all the layers of clothing. I had visitors, you see, and needed to begin another hunt for fat, colorful dog ticks. After 13 I stopped counting.

What, for goodness’ sake, was going on here?

For me and the 12 Bates students scattered about in the woods who had signed up for the course, the 24-hour solo fast in the Berkshires was the intentional part. Everything else was a freebie from the unknown. And the most curious thing of all, when it was all over, I felt a genuine gratitude for all of the experience, including the cold, rain, and ticks. They had taught me something unexpected and invaluable. I’ll come back to this.

A chain of such experiential moments — the solo fast being just one of the more salient examples — stretched from one end of Short Term to the other. As far as I knew, nothing quite like “Wake Up!” had ever been tried at Bates before. It was a hybrid that wedded rigorous academic inquiry with direct, personal, unmediated experiential learning. Each of the halves reinforced the other.

In a symbolic ritual, Alice Thompson '10 of Pittsburgh, Pa., has her face washed by Kate FitzGerald '10 of Chilmark, Mass., at Bradbury Mountain State Park.

I find that we live in an intensely cerebral culture. One Buddhist thinker, when asked what the problem was for Westerners, responded simply, “Lost in thought, lost in thought.” Rather than living in the moment and paying close attention to phenomena as they occur, we often recycle habitual narratives. The stories in our heads become the “reality” we inhabit. We become lost in thought. Our day-to-day lives are characterized by what I call automatisms: deeply ingrained habits of mind that act as perceptual filters and subconscious pigeon-holers.

Buddhism calls it sleeping or sleep-walking. Waking up (hence the course title) requires a lot of attention, mindfulness, and determination, through age-old practices like daily yoga and Vipassana (insight) meditation to the solo fast.

In Vipassana, one learns to quiet the mind. In the beginning, a 20-minute session in our classroom on the second floor of Dana Chemistry was an ordeal. Thoughts, memories, desires, anticipations, worries, preoccupations jumped helter-skelter through the students’ minds (Buddhists call it “monkey mind”). Five weeks later, after a lot of practice, these same students commented that our last 20-minute sit together seemed more like five. They had grown far more centered and mindful.

We spent a week at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies engaged in a study retreat. Silence during certain hours of the day was combined with several hours of sitting and walking meditation followed by a three-hour seminar run by the Barre staff. Soon, a momentum was at work in the course, spanning the practices of furthering self-awareness, tying them into critical reflections on our relationship to nature, culminating in greater social commitment and heightened awareness of and interaction with others in the larger society.

A quarter-century of teaching at Bates has shown me how adept Bates students are at articulating abstract notions in academic papers. But at the same time they remain teenagers seeking their way in life. Often, I find, there is a profound disconnect between the two. So I wanted to provide a venue for learning and for experiencing some things that are essential to the development of young people, yet which they are otherwise not getting in academic courses.

Here’s an example. Two by two, students went into the woods to slowly, mindfully, wash the face of their partner by dipping a washcloth in the water of the little brook running there, and symbolically washing off the social kinds of masks we employ vis-à-vis each other. The ritual was a way of breaking through habit and comfort, and coming to realize that all of us bear these masks, whether we’re aware of it or not. A kind of gentleness and tenderness and awareness of oneself and the person right in front of you came to the fore.

So, is this what should I be doing as a Bates professor? Is this what I should be offering my students? The German philosopher Martin Heidegger talks about creating a situation where learning can take place. My task then, at least as I see it, is to create a situation where intense learning can take place in individuals. But this learning should also contribute to the needs of the larger democratic society, which surely requires an awake, critically aware, and engaged citizenry.

And those dog ticks I mentioned? They taught me humility, patience, limits, and the wonderful humor of the situation. A citizen needs those too.

By Dennis Sweet

Photographs by Phyllis Graber Jensen

The syllabus for Professor of German Denis Sweet’s Short Term course featured readings from, among others, Emerson (“Self-Reliance”), Thoreau (“Walking”), and Nhat Hanh (The Miracle of Mindfulness). For more course information go to http://abacus.bates.edu/~dsweet/wakeup/.

Multimedia story about Denis Sweet’s course http://www.bates.edu/x183709.xml.

Dr. Khassan Baiev, a Chechen physician, author and human rights activist, will speak at Bates College on International Human Rights Day at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 11, in Room 204 of Carnegie Science Hall, 44 Campus Ave. The public is invited to attend the talk, titled Chechnya Today: A Doctor’s Perspective, free of charge. For more information, call 207-786-6289.

A surgeon during the first (1994-1996) and second (1999-present) Chechen wars, Baiev operated on both Russians and Chechens, attracting criticism and death threats from both Russian special forces and Chechen extremists. Physicians for Social Responsibility helped Baiev apply for asylum in the United States, where he emigrated in 2000. Today he lives in Massachusetts with his wife and their six children.

Author of a widely acclaimed memoir, The Oath: Surgeon Under Fire (Walker & Company, 2004), Baiev has said: “I wrote The Oath for two reasons. I wanted the world to know that war is a hellish thing, which victimizes the innocent. In war there are no winners. Second, and equally important, I wanted to introduce my readers to the Chechen people.” The Boston Globe describes Baiev’s volume as a “vivid, disturbing account” that “unfolds in the mind’s eye like a movie. His extraordinary empathy for both sides is inspiring.”

During the last three years, Baiev has become an outspoken advocate for human rights, focusing his efforts on the International Committee for the Children of Chechnya. Featured in The New York Times and on National Public Radio, he has been honored by Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights and Amnesty International. His talk at Bates follows his visit to the University of Southern Maine’s Lewiston-Auburn College, Room 170, 51 Westminster St., where he will participate in a daylong human rights celebration with a Chechen focus. Read about these USM-LAC activities, or call 207-753-6574.

Baiev’s Bates talk is sponsored by the college’s medical studies program, the biology department, the German and Russian studies department, the humanities division and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

A visit to the local Jewish cemetery taught Timothy McCall ’08 of Lawrenceville, N.J., a timeless lesson in history.

After spending the summer researching the livelihoods of Jewish merchants who arrived in Lewiston-Auburn in the 1870s, first from Germany and then from Eastern Europe, McCall decided to “fully connect with the community” by visiting the graves of individuals whose names he recognized from weeks of primary-source research.

McCall, a double major in History and German, had been comparing the history of the Jewish community to the larger economic story of the twin cities of the Androscoggin. “The Jews were very much dependent on the mills for their livelihood and the solvency of their businesses,” McCall writes. As the area’s once thriving textile and shoe mills disappeared, so too did the Jewish community shrink. “For the Jewish merchants, the closures meant their loyal customers were without jobs and without disposable income.” Read more here.