Davis Project for Peace recipients Spencer Collet ’13 and James LePage ’13. Photograph by Michael Bradley/Bates College.

Initiatives to foster Israeli-Palestinian dialogue through the Web and nurture collaborative conversations in a recently liberalized Myanmar have garnered Davis Projects for Peace awards for three Bates students.

The $10,000 awards support international projects that college students undertake to “bring new thinking to the prospects of peace in the world,” in the words of philanthropist Kathryn Wasserman Davis. Learn more.

Two seniors, Spencer Collet of Leawood, Kan., and James LePage of Cumberland, Maine, received the award for “Tweets for Peace,” their project using the Internet to enhance communication between Israeli and Palestinian youth. The pair will work with former participants in the Seeds of Peace conflict resolution program that takes place every summer in Otisfield, Maine.

2013 Davis Project for Peace recipient Aung Myint ’14. Photograph by Michael Bradley/Bates College.

Aung Myint, a junior from Yangon, Myanmar, received his award for “Minorities, Monasteries, and Conversations,” a reading-discussion program to help build the capacity for critical judgment and constructive dialogue among ethnic minorities in his native country. Using Burmese translations of English texts from the Maryland-based Touchstones Discussion Project, Myint will coordinate gatherings in Buddhist monasteries in Yangon.

Learn more about the Bates students’ Projects for Peace:

• Tweets for Peace
• Minorities, Monasteries, and Conversations

Record-holding sprinter Isaiah Spofford ’15 will try the 400 meters this spring.
Photo by Tom Leonard ’78.

Spofford holds the Bates record in the 60-meter dash, 7.09 seconds. While the 60-meter event is only a few years old, head coach Al Fereshetian points out that Spofford’s 55 time would be 10th-best in Bates history.

The point, Fereshetian tells reporter Travis Lazarczyk, is that Spofford is fast and getting faster. “Our expectations are very high. He put in a fantastic fall of training.”

Spofford is runninf the 60- and 200-meter sprints this winter, then will add the 400 during the outdoor season. “Ever since I was a sophomore in high school, people have told me I’ll ease into the 400,” Spofford tells Lazarczyk. “This year I think it’s going to happen.”

• View story from the Morning Sentinel, Jan. 8, 2013

Gathered students, staff and faculty fill the College Chapel pews during a memorial service for Evan Dube '15. Photographs by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

“We’re here to embrace Evan’s life and memory, and we’re also here to embrace each other as we try to move through this,” Associate Dean of Students James Reese told Bates folks gathered to remember a much-loved, now much-missed student.

“Share what you want to share and be who you want to be about this enormous matter, whenever you want,” Reese told the Bates people who had been closest to Evan Dube ’15, who died May 19 during a Bates Short Term trip to Scotland.

Reese spoke during a noontime memorial gathering on May 24 for Dube. Bates’ goodbye to Dube will be long, but this first remembrance revealed a path toward healing as people who knew him, or wished they had, shared glimpses of a spirit inspirational in its eager openness.

Professor of History Michael Jones, one of the Bates faculty members who led the Shetland Islands trip, remembers Evan Dube '15.

Filling the College Chapel were hundreds of Bates faculty, staff and students, including friends who were by Dube’s side when he slipped from life on a beach on the island of Shetland Mainland.

Organized by the Multifaith Chaplaincy, the memorial wrapped readings, recollections and music in periods of silence that afforded a little time for reflection. “We see silence not as a place where nothing is happening,” explained Associate Multifaith Chaplain Emily Wright-Magoon, “but as a place where a lot is going on, where all of our inner voices are speaking within us, among us.”

Silence is “a really profound way of being together in community” — and more than welcome as a distressed campus sought to make sense of Dube’s passing.

Interim President Nancy Cable shared a message that Evan’s parents, John and Eileen Dube, have posted. “Many of you have asked us, ‘What can we do to help?” the Dubes wrote.

“And our family would like for each of you, for all of you, to do a random act of kindness for someone, anyone . . . a person you’ve just met or someone you don’t know at all. In that way you will honor the memory of who Evan truly was: a gentle soul, a kind heart who loved all, unconditionally.”

Indeed, Evan’s open-heartedness resonated through the Chapel as students, staff and faculty shared impressions and memories. “He wanted to be friends with everyone,” said his friend and classmate John Goodman, who quoted a Latin saying that Dube had posted on his Facebook site: “Alter ipse amicus,” translated as “a friend is another self.”

Olivia Norrmen-Smith '13 and Justin Lipton '12 perform "Blackbird" by John Lennon and Paul McCartney during the service.

One of Dube’s floormates from the 280 College Street residence noted Evan’s willingness to let arguments go and bygones be bygones. “He loved us as a family,” she said, “and we didn’t know each other before we got here.”

A few people, including one of the faculty members who led the Short Term visit to the Shetland Islands, noted Dube’s eager embrace of classical and medieval studies. During the trip, said history professor Michael Jones, he had asked Dube to help transcribe an old handwritten document, and gave him a website on paleography, the study of old handwriting, that might help with the task.

“He gave me, after that, his website on paleography,” Jones said, to appreciative laughter.

As we deal with the pain of losing someone close, part of the struggle is simply trying to find a place for such a loss, a way to understand it that enables us to keep going. Dube was a Buddhist, and one reading from a Buddhist philosopher offered some comfort from that perspective.

Those attending the service find comfort in each other and the opportunity to reflect.

Aung Myint ’14, who comes from Myanmar and leads Buddhist meditation sessions at Bates, read from Contemplation of No-Coming, No-Going by author and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh:

“Birth and death are only doors through which we pass, secret thresholds on our journey. Birth and death are a game of hide and seek. So love with me, hold my hand. Let us say goodbye, say goodbye to meet again soon. We meet today, we will meet again tomorrow, we will meet at the source of every moment.”

Another kind of comfort, harder but maybe more cathartic, came from Evan Dube himself. Wright-Magoon and Multifaith Chaplain Bill Blaine-Wallace read from a few Twitter posts that he had made in November and December. In one, the Bates first-year quoted A.A. Milne, from Winnie-the-Pooh:

“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”

On Sunday night, at least 200 Bates College students, faculty and staff members crowded into Perry Atrium in the college’s Pettengill Hall for comfort and support, and to share thoughts and stories about Evan. He was remembered as a young man who was studious and serious, exuberant and funny — and a caring friend.

From Plaistow, N.H., Evan was pursuing classical studies at Bates. He amassed an impressive theatrical resume during his high school years and had already entertained the campus with his performance as the cowboy Virgil in the Department of Theater’s production of Bus Stop last fall.

Associate Dean of Student James Reese recounted that in September 2011, during orientation for the first-year class, Evan also impressed his classmates and others by winning an annual competition to become the first new student to recite the Bates mission statement by heart. “He spoke every word correctly and in a way that gave every word meaning.” Reese also noted that when the time came to publicly recognize Evan for his win, he wasn’t present, because he had left early to do homework.

College Multifaith Chaplain Bill Blaine-Wallace recounted Evan, a Buddhist, “bounding” into his office to introduce himself and to say, “I have some very unusual religious beliefs, and I thought that as chaplain you should know.”

The event concluded a difficult day for the Bates community as the campus learned Sunday afternoon about Evan’s passing via an email message from Dean of Students Tedd Goundie.

“We will be absorbing this terrible loss for many days and long into the future,” Goundie wrote. “Please join me in keeping Evan’s family and friends in your thoughts and prayers.”

Evan’s fellow students in Scotland are receiving grief counseling and will return to Boston on Tuesday.

The Bates Multifaith Chaplaincy and the college’s Health Center are providing counseling for members of the campus community.

Incident background

Evan was one of 10 Bates students in a study-abroad class co-taught by Gerry Bigelow, Bates lecturer in history, and Professor of History Michael Jones.

The students were participating in the Shetland Islands Climate and Settlement Project, an ongoing archaeological research project funded by the National Science Foundation, involving scholars from Bates and other higher education institutions.

Following a preliminary investigation, Scottish law enforcement authorities stated that “there do not appear to be any suspicious circumstances surrounding the incident.”

The authorities have given this account of the incident:

Class members went to a beach south of the town of Lerwick, on the Shetland island called Mainland, to have a cookout. They arrived a little after 9 p.m. local time. Shortly afterward, Evan dived into the ocean briefly, then collapsed as he left the water.

Evan’s companions took immediate action, beginning resuscitation efforts and calling emergency medical services.

A local ambulance arrived on the scene within minutes, followed quickly by a helicopter that airlifted Evan to the nearest hospital, in Lerwick. Resuscitation efforts administered from the outset were unsuccessful.

The college has no other information about the incident to offer — simply that we have lost a member of our Bates community long before his time.

“I don’t think I could find a better balance anywhere else of everything: diversity, athletics, academics, fun, seriousness,” said Allaina Murphy ’15 of Poland Spring, who graduated from St. Dominic High School in Auburn.

Washuk explains that generous financial aid has made it possible for them to attend the college. Director of Admission Leigh Weisenburger tells Washuk that Bates is making a point of tending to its relationships with area high schools, including “making sure guidance counselors know where we are, what Bates is all about. Having those lines of communication open.”

Among the five local freshmen are two Somali students, the first members of the local immigrant community to matriculate at Bates. That’s a point of pride, Lewiston mayor Larry Gilbert tells the Sun Journal. Their matriculation is “a first, and a plus.” View story from the Sun Journal, Sept. 6, 2011.

A particularly egregious case was a student from Sri Lanka who originally expected to arrive on Monday, Aug. 29. The first travel alternative the airline offered wouldn’t have gotten him here till Sept. 6.

But Reese knew that airline schedules would be deranged during a tropical storm, and he urged the frustrated and anxious young man to keep trying for a better arrangement. The dean told him to get a good night’s sleep and then get back on the phone and try again. “The secret is just persistence,” says Reese, a frequent traveler himself to Sri Lanka, where he visits his in-laws.

The student did finally manage an itinerary that got him here around midnight Saturday — after a 56-hour journey that included an 18-hour layover in the other LA, Los Angeles. Reese picked him and another international traveler up at the Portland International Jetport, and expected to do the same for two more students, one from Pakistan and the other from Vietnam, in the wee small hours of Sunday. “Rebookings tend to be the last planes of the day,” he explained. “That’s where the empty seats are.”

The delays gave him a few short nights of sleep, but Reese didn’t seem to mind. “I love those moments when a student arrives,” he said.

“We get into the office about 1:30 in the morning and I tell them to call their parents. You can hear that energy on the other end of the line — that’s one of the most wonderful moments, the joy of hearing their child’s voice from a safe place.”

• Click on thumbnails, above, to view the slide show.

Images from Bates Orientation for the Class of 2015 on Sept. 3, 2011.

“Become a sociologist of concepts, or perhaps an archeologist of culture,” the Bates College Class of 2015 was told as the new academic year began — in other words, this is your time to understand, and redefine, the social norms that guide us through life.

That message was the centerpiece of Tuesday’s Convocation ceremony. Keynote speaker Francesco Duina, professor of sociology and author of a nationally noted analysis of the American preoccupation with winning and losing, shared the podium with interim President Nancy Cable, the college’s dean of the faculty, the president of the student government and others in welcoming 506 first-year and seven new transfer students to campus.

The Class of 2015, by the numbers.

Convocation in sound and image.

The threat of damp weather sent the ceremony inside Alumni Gym. Lewiston Mayor Larry Gilbert was among guests joining faculty, staff and students for the hourlong event.

Cosmin Ghita ’12, Bates Student Government president, welcomed the gathering by playing with the sociological concept of social constructs (and a bit of Harry Potter). But the crux of his introduction was the time-tested message that the first-year students have arrived not only at Bates, but at a point in life where they really must consider, and own, their decisions.

Members of the Class of 2015 have chosen Bates as the car dealer that can “provide the vehicle to get you to your destination” in life. “Bates will give you the best of what it has . . . but Bates will not drive you,” he said. “You’re responsible for getting to your own destination.”

‘Sociologists of concepts’

Pamela Baker ’70, a biologist and the college’s dean of the faculty since July 1, reminded the new class that these next few years are prime time for risk-taking — something also integral to the work of established scholars, who must submit their discoveries to the tests of public scrutiny.

Never again will these new students be so thoughtfully challenged, nor so well-supported in facing those challenges. “We will expect you to think about things from new perspectives, to ask difficult questions, to exercise creativity, to become a scholar in your own right,” Baker said.

“We stand with you at the threshold of your academic career at Bates. A liberal arts education, and a Bates education specifically, will prepare you for what you cannot yet imagine.”

Pointing out the high caliber of achievement needed to get into Bates, Baker called the new students “winners” — a passing note that resonated in Some Thoughts on Words and Time, Duina’s address.

He is the author of the book Winning: Reflections on an American Obsession, which scrutinizes that peculiarly American worldview whose poles are victory and defeat. The book was the summer reading assignment for the Class of 2015, and the topic of both Duina’s Convocation talk and an orientation weekend panel discussion.

Insightful and provocative, Winning seeks to explain our fixation on winning and losing, our collective beliefs about winners and losers, and what we’re really after as we struggle to win. Duina argues that victory is not a goal in itself, but a symbol of something immensely important: affirmation of our place in the world.

He suggests that the win-loss mindset can be an addiction cycle in which winning is ultimately nothing but anesthesia for an ever-growing sense of emptiness.

Duina laid the groundwork for his talk with two sharply contrasting sets of messages. On the one hand were repeating athletics spots, seen earlier that day on a video monitor in Merrill Gym, driven by the theme of winning. On the other: Jante’s Law, 10 principles for socially correct behavior that are ingrained in Scandinavian society and include such precepts as “Don’t think you are good at anything” and “Don’t think anyone cares about you.”

Specifically for his first-year listeners, Duina drew two lessons from the American obsession. The first was that these ways of seeing the world are not physical laws — they are only social constructs that can be examined, considered and used or discarded as one pleases.

In short, they are only words, if powerful ones. “There is really no need to subjugate yourself to whatever constructions happen to be dominant,” he said. At the same time, there is the exciting challenge of investigating those constructions, and in so doing, coming to better understand both society and ourselves.

“Use the resources of Bates to engage in some serious deconstruction and exploration, and then to rebuild and come away a rounder, fuller person. Become a sociologist of concept, or perhaps an archeologist of culture.”

For his second theme, Duina borrowed his father’s concept that life is time. Cycling through existence as an endless series of challenges presented and met, prizes sought and won, he said, leaves unanswered the central questions of our existence. “I invite you to treat your years at Bates with care, and not as a stretch of time on life’s treadmill.”

He said, “Indeed, in a way there should be no next step, no next challenge, but a simple unfolding of yourselves.”

‘Our shared anthem’

In her Invitation to the College Community, President Cable transcended the usual advice to the newbies, instead asking the entire campus community to rally around the values and goals that constitute the essential Bates. From The Good Life, the final book written by the late Rev. Peter Gomes ’65, Cable adapted the formula of “three timeless pillars of a respectable college education”: humanity, virtue and piety.

For Cable, “humanity” speaks to our ever-present “opportunity, the individual choice . . . to follow precepts of kindness, benevolence and shared dignity with our human brothers and sisters and with the world in which we live.”

If virtue’s meaning tends to shift with the times and across cultural norms, she said it now “invites us to consider actions that reflect excellence, principles of goodness and fundamental fairness.”

And while piety is hard to divorce from its religious connotations, Cable suggested that for Bates it invites a “humbling respect . . . for principles so beautifully outlined in the Bates Mission Statement,” revised in 2010.

She requested that the audience “listen for your part in Bates’ mission and its work as a college in the year ahead” as she read the mission statement.

“This is our shared anthem, all of us and each of us.”

The program also featured well-received performances by the Deansmen and the Merimanders, Bates’ oldest a cappella ensembles, and a benediction from the Rev. Bill Blaine-Wallace, Multifaith Chaplain.

Blaine-Wallace led a moment of silence in the memory of economics professor David Aschauer, who died in August; and offered a series of hopes for the community that included, “May we not go it alone.”

The former hurricane, still packing heavy rain and strong winds, cast doubt on whether new students could get to Bates in time for their trips; and whether AESOP could launch the trips from Bates and to the intended destinations.

Mike Sagan ’12, current Outing Club president, and past president Kellen MacFadyen ’12 organized the 2011 AESOP program. As the storm drew near, they stayed glued to the forecasts and worked with associate deans of students Holly Gurney and James Reese to plan for the worst (even speculating, says Sagan, on the prospects for putting campers in the Gray Cage).

Sagan pondered trip logistics while MacFadyen’s job was to track (and in several cases fetch from the airport) incoming students who faced storm-related delays.

One of those students was Matt Neal ’14 of Indianapolis. He and his parents spent 35 hours driving to Lewiston. Thanks to roads closed by Irene, “we were pretty much stuck in the car,” says Neal, who did make his scheduled AESOP departure. “We spent a couple of hours at a McDonald’s, but you can only do that for so long.”

In the end, some 10 students simply arrived too late to take part in AESOP. Eight or so students arrived later than they’d hoped, but were either driven out to meet their scheduled expeditions, or given an alternative such as a “chillin’ trip” spent tenting at Hermit Island, or joining a community-service AESOP group working in Lewiston.

While some itineraries were changed, mostly due to water conditions, only one — a canoe trip on the Saco River — was canceled, as the outfitting company conducting the trip felt that the river was rolling too high. “Safety was our No. 1 priority,” says Sagan. “Everyone was very understanding” about the adjustments that the storm caused.

So in the end, AESOP got off easy — as did Bates and Maine in general, especially considering the misery the storm inflicted elsewhere. In part, that’s certainly a result of Irene’s timing and path through New England. “We were very fortunate,” says MacFadyen.

But the success of the 2011 program also reflects the spirit and expertise of the Bates Outing Club. “We were passionate about getting the kids outside,” says MacFadyen. “The Outing Club is very dedicated to that cause.”

“That gung-ho, can-do spirit absolutely translated into AESOP 2011,” Sagan agrees. “There was never any question in our minds that the trips would go on” one way or another.

In G54 stood Doug Kempner ’12 of Burlington Vt., behind a table stacked with Maine voter registration cards. Kempner, active in the Bates Democrats student organization, was wearing the club T-shirt, which prompted a few “Where are the Republicans?” questions from parents and students who stopped by. (Answer: Both political clubs were invited to staff the table; Kempner had spent the summer in Maine and was available during Orientation, while the College Republicans didn’t have a club member on campus so early.)

Kempner spent the summer in Lewiston working on a Maine citizen’s petition effort that seeks to overturn a new law that eliminates same-day voter registration, requiring new voters to register more than two business days before an election. The upshot is that college students in Maine would have to — gulp — plan ahead if they wish to vote in the state.

Supporters say the law solves the problem of unmanageable registration paperwork on Election Day, protects voting integrity and brings Maine into line with other states. Opponents say the law will dampen voter turnout. The repeal question will be on the Maine ballot in November, giving the members of the Class of 2015 who registered during Orientation something to vote for…or against.