Hiroya Miura conducts the Bates College Orchestra.

Music written for the recent inauguration of Bates College President A. Clayton Spencer is featured in the next performance of the Bates College Orchestra, taking place at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 10, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Hiroya Miura, associate professor of music, is the orchestra’s music director and conductor. Admission to the concert is free, but tickets are required. For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu.

The orchestra’s program comprises Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn, and the inauguration music composed by William Matthews, Alice Swanson Esty Professor of Music at Bates, which begins the evening.

Matthews composed a setting for the Wallace Stevens poem “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm.” The piece was the musical centerpiece for the Oct. 26 installation of President Spencer, who chose Stevens’ contemplative poem for her inaugural program.

Stevens’ text will be sung by the Bates College Choir. Matthews’ setting also includes readings from three different cultures presented by Bates students in their native languages — Amna Ilyas, a senior from Faisalabad, Pakistan, reading in Urdu; Adnan Shami Shah, a sophomore from Kathmandu, Nepal, reading in Nepali; and So Hee Ki, a first-year student from Irvine, Calif., reading in Korean.

The Brahms work, considered a turning point in the composer’s confidence and skill in orchestral composition, is a masterful set of independent variations on a theme that was attributed to Haydn in Brahms’ day, but is now believed to be the product of a student of Haydn’s.

One of Beethoven’s most popular works, his Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92, was premiered just shy of 199 years prior to the Bates performance. The piece is known for the emotional spectrum that it encompasses, from dancelike ebullience to the melancholia of the second movement. The symphony is also celebrated for the composer’s brilliant transitions from key to key.

Photographer and videographer Phyllis Graber Jensen offers behind-the-scenes video moments rich in symbolism, splendor and humanity.

It’s all here, from the robing of the academic procession and the fellowship of Bates’ four presidents together, to the Spencer family gathering for a group photograph.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The inauguration stage was designed by Michael Reidy, senior lecturer in theater and managing director of theater and dance.

He explains that presenting the stage as a triangle of sorts — “kicking the stage on an angle,” he says — was done to give spectators an unobstructed view of the platform party, podium and musical performers.

Produced by the college’s Digital Media Center, the video uses photographs taken over seven days with an automated Canon Rebel XS. The images were converted to high-definition (1080p) video using Apple Compressor’s image sequencer, then edited inside Final Cut 7. The tilt-shift effect — which focuses the viewer’s attention on the stage through a slight blur of the top and bottom of the video — was added using Apple Motion 6.

Thank you Jacqui, Michael, Pat, Jennifer, mayors Macdonald and LaBonté, and Adam for your greetings from many quarters.

Bates is privileged to be part of a community with a rich history and increasingly vibrant present, and I have felt at home here from the moment the moving trucks pulled up at 256 College Street this past summer. We and our host cities draw strength from a partnership of genuine mutuality. Give us a little time, and I’m pretty sure that it is our West Coast counterpart that will be known as the “other LA.”

I am also honored to be joined today by my three predecessors — Don Harward, Elaine Hansen, and Nancy Cable. Their presence marks the fact that this ceremony is not about any given individual, but rather about the institution — its history, its values, and the mission we carry into the future. Anything we are able to accomplish in the coming years will build on the contributions you made to the fabric of this campus and college. Thank you for your leadership, and thank you for being here today.

About 2,500 guests attended the installation ceremony for A. Clayton Spencer as the eighth president of Bates College on Friday, Oct. 26, 2012. Photo: Mike Bradley/Bates College.

I want to welcome and thank, as well, presidents and delegates from our sister institutions in Maine, and from colleges and universities across New England, the nation, and even the Atlantic. Your presence honors Bates, and we appreciate your solidarity and support at this moment of great meaning for us.

Thank you students, faculty, and staff, who are the heart and soul of this remarkable campus community. Here, I want to give special thanks to the many individuals who have knocked themselves out planning these festivities and tackling every detail so that we would all feel welcomed and well taken care of.

Clayton Spencer hoists the cap that her father, Samuel Reid Spencer, wore as president of Mary Baldwin College and Davidson College, during her installation ceremony as the eighth president of Bates College on Friday, Oct. 26, 2012. Photo: Mike Bradley/Bates College.

Thank you, as well, trustees, former trustees, and alumni — those of you present here and those of you participating at a distance. You serve and support the college in so many ways, and we are deeply grateful.

I want to give a special thanks to my friends and family who have turned up in force — my children, my parents, my brother and sister, my phalanx of relatives, and friends and colleagues from so many chapters of my life. It is such a joy to share this moment with all of you.

It is a special honor for me to wear, on this occasion, the cap that my father wore throughout his academic career, including 26 years as president of two different liberal arts colleges. It is an understatement to say that my parents have made a heroic effort to travel up here to be with us today. It is characteristic of their generosity and their spirit, and I appreciate beyond measure that they are here.

• • •

It is an uncommon privilege to be invited to step into the history of an institution. And it is a daunting responsibility to be asked to point the way into an inevitably uncertain future.

It is worth remembering, as we try our best to look ahead and make out the shape of things to come, that our predictions are always defined more by the past we have lived than by the future we imagine. Who among us in the early 1990s would have guessed at the profound reshaping of contemporary life about to be ushered in by the Internet? And who, on September 10, 2001, would have predicted a decade defined by a “War on Terror,” U.S. involvement in two literal wars, and a fundamental recasting of America’s place in the world?

When George Colby Chase was installed as the second president of Bates, he described “a society so complex that its numberless and every-varying elements with their incessant action and reaction, dizzy the clearest brain and baffle the subtlest power of analysis….”[1] That was 1894.

In 1920, on the heels of World War I — the so-called war to end all wars — our third president, Clifton Daggett Gray, spoke of the future with foreboding: “This generation has only to look at what is going on under its very eyes to realize that there is taking place in both hemispheres something, the full significance of which no one is wise enough at present to estimate, but which is bound to affect for good or ill the destinies of the whole world for centuries to come.”[2] Little did President Gray know that the Great Depression and World War II would come along during his tenure to confirm his worst fears.

In 1967, as the civil rights movement shook the nation, Detroit burned, and campuses were torn apart by the Vietnam War, Thomas Hedley Reynolds, our fifth president, noted the “remarkable rapidity of change in this country in the last half century,” and worried about the “many dangers” confronting “this college and … others of its kind.”[3]

Of course, at that moment, Reynolds, and Bates College, stood on the threshold of one of the most stable and prosperous half-centuries in human history — a period that we may well look back on as the golden age of higher education in America.

We can never know what the future has in store for us. The best we can do is to engage the present and make our way forward with energy, diligence, and authenticity.

• • •

Bates brings to this task a strong history. We are proud of our story of origin, and we tell it often. Bates was established in 1855 by Freewill Baptists, who were also abolitionists. We were coed from the beginning; we recruited freed slaves to come here after the Civil War; and we never had fraternities or sororities because they ran against our egalitarian grain. This is a good story, but like any story that we tell over and over, I worry that we may no longer hear its meaning. So I thought today I would share a slightly different story — one that is familiar in its broad outlines, but revealing to me, and I hope to you, in its particulars.

As most of you probably know, one of our most distinguished graduates is Benjamin Elijah Mays, an American preacher, educator, scholar, and civil rights leader, who was president of Morehouse College in Atlanta from 1940 to 1967. Influenced by Mahatma Gandhi, he was an important mentor to Martin Luther King Jr., and an advisor to U.S. presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

The youngest of eight children, Mays was born in 1894 to tenant farmers, and he grew up outside of Ninety-Six, South Carolina, in a county notorious for racial extremism.[4] In 1917, he came to Bates as a sophomore, at age 23, after cobbling together a high school education against all odds. You see, black children in Greenwood County were allowed to attend school for only four months a year — November through February. The rest of the time they were expected to be available for farm work.

Within his first eight weeks at Bates, Mays won the Sophomore Declamation Prize, and he was then recruited to join the college’s storied debate team. He graduated in 1920, one of fifteen students awarded honors, and he was chosen by his peers to be the class day speaker. Later, Mays went on to the University of Chicago, where he earned his master’s and Ph.D.

In his autobiography, written when he was in his seventies, Mays recounts the following story: “At Bates, teachers spoke to Negro students on campus and downtown, especially if the Negro student was in a professor’s class. I knew one or two professors at the University of Chicago in 1921 who never recognized a Negro student when off campus or on.”[5]

Not all of Mays’ experiences at Bates were positive. He was “furious” when he was not chosen to participate in either of the intercollegiate debates his junior year — against Cornell and Harvard — despite being one of the top debaters on the team,[6] and he nearly froze his fingers and toes off while clearing snow at President Chase’s house on Christmas Day when it was forty-four below zero.[7] But Mays counted his disappointments and challenges “as nothing compared to the rich harvest I gleaned from my association with the Bates faculty and students.”[8]

Bates admitted black students, educated women along with men, and banned exclusive social clubs not because it was the politically correct thing to do. Quite the contrary, these policies were seriously politically incorrect in their time. Rather, as the story of Benjamin Mays makes clear, we did it because, somehow, from our very beginnings, we encountered individuals in their full humanity. We took as our task educating them with intellectual rigor, ethical responsibility, and care for their fellow human beings.

These qualities are in the DNA of Bates College, and they define us to this day. They also point the way forward.

• • •

Last month, Rafael Reif was installed as the 17th president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He spoke about our changing world and the implications for higher education. According to Reif, we find ourselves now on the threshold of a “technological transformation [that] has the potential to reshape the education landscape — and to challenge our very existence.”[9]

Bates is not MIT. And it is not our first impulse to frame our future in terms of changes in technology. Yet the technology Reif is talking about is more than a tool, it is a cultural force changing the way we live our lives and experience the world. It is reshaping our professional interactions, transforming the nature and structure of social relations, and altering our connection to information and knowledge.

Some believe that the Internet will follow radio and television, bringing broad social change while leaving institutions like ours more or less unperturbed. Others point to the printing press, which made knowledge available to the masses, leading, inexorably, to the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the modern West. One thing is certain: the context in which we do what we do in higher education has changed irrevocably.

This is partly because these forces hit us where we live in higher education — some of the most powerful changes are occurring at the heart of scholarship and knowledge creation. And it is partly because the changes happening around us have altered the frame through which our particular model of education is viewed.

In science, for example, online depositories allow scholarly exchange to short-circuit traditional peer review, challenging the role of scholarly journals. The Public Library of Science — PLOS — publishes open-access online journals that, in less than a decade, are among the most highly cited in biology, genetics, and medicine.[10]

Rich archives, once available only in person, are being put online. The Library of Congress has digitized historic newspapers, classic prints and photographs, as well as the correspondence of figures ranging from Alexander Graham Bell and Abraham Lincoln to Frederick Douglass and Hannah Arendt.[11] The Google Art Project has brought online over 32,000 works by 7,200 artists, housed in 156 collections around the world.[12] One can explore these paintings in remarkable detail — down to the individual brushstroke.

These breakthroughs in technology present tremendous opportunities for places like Bates. No longer does a senior writing a history thesis have to travel to Boston to find materials or wait three weeks to get primary sources through interlibrary loan. Language students can hone their conversational style by watching foreign-language soap operas whenever it suits them on any one of their mobile devices. And our “Presidential Campaign Rhetoric” class can pore over Clinton’s convention speech, as written and as delivered. For institutions, as for individuals, the world is quite literally a click away.

In their intellectual reach, then, Bates, and liberal arts colleges like us, have become a great deal larger. Yet enlarging the screen on which we must project our institutional identity and compete for faculty and students makes this tiny campus in Lewiston, Maine, look ever smaller. The liberal arts colleges, taken together, educate fewer than four percent of the college students in America.[13] That fraction shrinks further against a large and growing global denominator.

Beyond sheer numbers, what Hedley Reynolds described as the “tough-minded tradition of the small New England college”[14] is at risk of looking dangerously quaint in a world of rapidly growing global populations, hungry for knowledge and credentials. Furthermore, the expansion of knowledge and fields of research renders increasingly arbitrary our choices about the faculty we hire and the courses we teach.

Finally, ready access to the world’s most enticing intellectual capital at little or no cost makes the residential model of the liberal arts feel ever more expensive. With Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and other leading universities putting highly produced courses online — often in fields we don’t even teach — we can be sure that students and their parents will scrutinize intensely the value proposition of the residential liberal arts model.

• • •

We welcome this scrutiny because it forces us to get very clear about who we are and what we do. It challenges us to make a virtue of our scale, delivering our particular model of education at a high standard of excellence. What is this model? It is the compelling paradox of the liberal arts, where we value the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, with no practical aim, and at the same time prize the teaching of values — of curiosity and empathy, imagination and confidence  — that shape a human being who can in turn shape the world. It is reaching up in pursuit of truth and reaching out in acts of service, and seeing no contradiction between the two.

Here I would like to return to the story of Benjamin Mays and suggest three lessons that it offers to the Bates of today.

First, the story of Benjamin Mays is a story about “mindset.” It is the story of a college that met the world head on from its very beginnings. Bucking history, convention, and the easy path, Bates engaged with a very complex social reality and pressed ahead based on a simple conviction — namely, that all human beings have free and equal access to God’s grace, and, by extension, to education and human fulfillment.[15]

This mindset — standing firmly on principle and encountering the world with energy and confidence — is highly relevant today. If success for colleges and universities was defined for the past thirty years as a niche competition based on wealth and prestige, in the next decades success will go to the institutions that engage most robustly and effectively with the forces that are reshaping our world.

It is not enough, in the liberal arts, to circle the wagons and assume that we can keep doing what we’re doing, the way we’ve always been doing it. In a world of exploding knowledge, we need to be highly intentional about how we recruit new faculty and how we configure departments to build on our particular strengths. We need to move beyond the limits of disciplinary structures to shape intellectual capacity and curriculum in ways that respond to the evolution of fields and student curiosity, while at the same time maintaining our standards of excellence. And we need to think pragmatically about how to support faculty members who wish to adapt their pedagogy to take greater advantage of the powerful tools that are now available.

With technology turning the world into our library, we must also work with faculty and students to gain access to the range of content and modes of intellectual production that are now at our fingertips. At the same time, the central goal of liberal education — “to nurture the growth of human talent in the service of human freedom,” as historian William Cronon puts it[16] — has never been more important. Given all that our students have coming at them — in the classroom, in their lives, and on their machines — they sorely need adults whom they know and respect to work with them as they learn to navigate complicated intellectual terrain.

The good class is not simply the “small” class, but rather the “engaged” class. Here, faculty, through their own passion and erudition, inspire students to take ideas seriously, and sometimes even to love them. They help students when the work gets hard — when texts resist interpretation, or require more context than an eighteen-year-old could possibly bring; when experiments fail in the lab; or when weeks of analysis must be scrubbed because of an error in a data set. Working closely with adults and with each other, students learn that although information may be a click away, mastery and meaning are not. Some kinds of knowledge require patience, and perseverance, and close attention.

This is what South African artist William Kentridge calls “getting our hands dirty.” Last spring, Kentridge gave the Norton Lectures at Harvard, and I was privileged to attend all six of them.[17] He titled the series, “Drawing Lessons,” and each week he invited us into his studio — through films, drawings, and reflections — and showed us how the studio is for him the place where he makes sense of the world. For Kentridge, meaning emerges from making. The making of the object is not a one-way translation of an idea into a visual object. Rather, the process of construction is where meaning materializes. From the act of encountering the world and rendering some aspect of it in physical form, we can then look at the object in front of us, and parts of the world and ourselves are revealed.

College, like the studio, is quintessentially a place of making — making sense of ourselves and making sense of our world. In this respect, the liberal arts college, with its intimate scale, has a distinct advantage. And Bates has a strong tradition of active, engaged learning to build on. All of our students write senior theses or develop capstone projects, working intensively with a faculty member one-on-one over a period of months. A third of our students work in the local community through their courses or the Harward Center for Community Partnerships. Our General Education Concentrations embrace problem-oriented and interdisciplinary approaches. And over sixty per cent of our students spend some portion of their undergraduate time abroad, quite literally engaged with the world.

In short, the mindset exemplified in the Benjamin Mays story is grounded in ideas and values, but porous to the world. For the liberal arts college it means, among other things, recognizing that the line between theory and practice is breaking down. It means acknowledging that our students’ work with Somali children and adults in Lewiston is not only an opportunity for service, but also a venue for cultural learning at a very high level. And it means that we see the growing concern of students and parents with employment prospects not as a domain beneath our proper notice, but rather as a deep aspect of our obligation as a liberal arts college to prepare our students for a life of purposeful work. At our best, we challenge ourselves as an institution to wrestle actively and joyously with the world as we encounter it. In so doing we model this mindset for our students as they work to construct their own lives.

Second, the story of Benjamin Mays is a human story. It is as much about “heart” as “head.” It illustrates the most distinctive and important dimension of our work at liberal arts colleges — the project of guiding young people through the passage from childhood to adulthood, to make them not only knowledgeable and equipped to navigate a complex world, but also motivated with empathy toward their fellow human beings. As Peter Gomes — another of our notable graduates — once said, we put “the making of a better person ahead of the making of a brighter person, or a better mousetrap.”[18]

This “making of a better person” is an important project, and one that liberal arts colleges are positioned to carry out better than any other higher education model — and certainly better than any machine. To paraphrase a recent Boston Globe headline, “There’s no app for answering deep questions.”[19] Questions, again in the words of Peter Gomes, like “What is my purpose? How can my life be better? How can I help to make a better world?” Gomes continues, “These are the questions worth asking, and college is one of the few places that allows you, even requires you, to do so.”[20]

It is not our job to supply the answers to these questions, but it is our job to create the conditions under which our students will be inspired to ask them for themselves. Learning here occurs in community. We are situated in a particular place, with a particular culture, and a particular set of human beings who come to know each other face to face. Just as all great novels are parochial novels,[21] so the most complete kind of human learning takes place in community, with the solidarity of companionship and the challenge of truth.

The liberal arts college embodies a powerful alchemy of the universal and the particular. The audacity of the intellectual project — to encompass knowledge across time and the world — invites our students to grapple with fundamental principles even as they hone their individuality. At the same time, our intimate scale creates a zone of care and concern that — when it works — produces graduates with ethical awareness and a commitment to serving purposes larger than themselves.

Finally, the story of Benjamin Mays is, at the most literal level, a story about community — not only what community is for, but how it is constructed. It is a story of openness and inclusion, well before we had the language for such things.

The genius of American higher education is that it unites excellence and opportunity at the heart of the enterprise, allowing talented students regardless of background or means to attend our best colleges and universities, and, conversely, allowing these institutions to draw from broad pools of talent that are constantly being renewed. This is a historical accident brought to us by the G.I. Bill following World War II and codified in the Federal Higher Education Act of 1965.[22]

Far from turning American colleges and universities into “hobo jungles,”[23] as predicted in 1944 by University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins, the returning GIs infused our institutions with talent, energy, aspiration, and grit, producing a higher education system of unmatched vitality and intellectual power. In other words, American higher education is excellent not in spite of its openness, but because of it.

At Bates, we claim this union of excellence and opportunity as a core element of our identity, and we need to continue to build on this deep aspect of who we are. As a practical matter this means redoubling our efforts to recruit students from a wide range of backgrounds, and it means maintaining an unwavering commitment to financial aid. A residential liberal arts education is expensive for us to offer and for families to afford. Unless we are content to become a luxury good — higher education’s version of the “gated community” — we must make sure that we have the financial means to seek out and admit talented students regardless of their ability to pay.

And we must make equally sure that, once here, our students encounter a diverse range of adults ready to support them for success, and a culture that embraces diversity across many dimensions, giving richness and power to the educational experience of all of our students.

• • •

It is no accident that one of the great technologists of our era, Steve Jobs, titled his commencement address at Stanford in 2005, “You’ve Got to Find What You Love.”[24] He told three stories — one called “Connecting the Dots”; one called “Love and Loss”; and one called “Death.” In this last story, in which he described being diagnosed with cancer and then apparently “cured,” Jobs delivered a simple message to the assembled students: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

Likewise, at Bates, we don’t have time to waste. In certain respects, we lag our peers in wealth and fame and market position. But we are not in danger of living someone else’s life. We know who we are and what we stand for, and we stand ready — together — to challenge ourselves and to engage the world.

Thank you.

This inaugural address by Bates President Clayton Spencer, “Questions Worth Asking,” was delivered on Oct. 26, 2012.

Endnotes

1. George Colby Chase, Bates College — Inaugural Address of President George C. Chase, September 22, 1894, p. 8.
2. Clifton Daggett Gray, “Inaugural Address,” Bates College Bulletin, Vol. 18, No. 1 (December 1920), p. 35.
3. Thomas Hedley Reynolds, “The Inaugural Address by Dr. Thomas Hedley Reynolds,” news release, October 7, 1967, pp. 4 and 8.
4. Benjamin E. Mays, Born to Rebel: An Autobiography. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987 (c. 1971), p. xliv.
5. Mays, p. 65.
6. Mays, pp. 58-59.
7. Mays, p. 54.
8. Mays, p. 60.
9. L. Rafael Reif, Inaugural Address, Office of the President, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, September, 21, 2012, http://president.mit.edu/speeches-writing/inaugural-address.
10. Thomson Reuters, http://thomsonreuters.com
11. Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/index.html
12. Google Art Project, http://www.googleartproject.com
13. See Helen L. Horowitz, “Balancing Hopes and Limits in the Liberal Arts College,” Liberal Arts Colleges in American Higher Education: Challenges and Opportunities, American Council of Learned Societies Occasional Paper No. 59 (2005), p. 18, retrieved from http://acls.org/uploadedFiles/Publications/OP/59_Liberal_Arts_Colleges.pdf
14. Reynolds Inaugural Address, p. 1.
15. Alfred Williams Anthony, Bates College and Its Background: A Review of Origins and Causes. Philadelphia: Judson Press, 1936, pp. 81-82. See also, Charles E. Clark, Bates Through the Years: An Illustrated History. Lewiston, ME: Bates College, 2005, p. 20.
16. William Cronon, “‘Only Connect…’: The Goals of a Liberal Education,” The American Scholar, Volume 67, No. 4 (Autumn 1998), retrieved from http://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Cronon_Only_Connect.pdf.
17. See http://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/content/norton-lectures.
18. Peter Gomes, Never Give Up! And Other Sermons Preached at Harvard, 2008–2010, ed. Cynthia Wight Rossano (Cambridge: Memorial Church, Harvard University, 2011) p. 21.
19. Karen Campbell, “Answering deep questions — there’s not an app for that,” interview with Howard Gardner, The Boston Globe, October 8, 2012, p. G14.
20. Gomes, p. 41.
21. Ian McEwan, “The Lever: Where Novelists Stand to Move the World,” (lecture, Harvard University, April 17, 2012).
22. See, for example, Patricia Strach, “Making Higher Education Affordable: Policy Design in Postwar America,” Journal of Policy History, Vol. 21, No. 1 (January 2009), pp. 61-88 (esp. pp. 65-67 and notes 19-28).
23. Robert Maynard Hutchins, “The Threat to American Education,” Collier’s, December 30, 1944, pp. 20-21.
24. “‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says,” Stanford Report, June 14, 2005, http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html.

Clayton Spencer holds the symbols of office during her installation ceremony as the eighth president of Bates College. The symbols are the keys, the presidential collar and the record book.

Bates formally installed Ava Clayton Spencer, a woman described by her former boss as the “embodiment of Bates values,” as its eighth president before a gathering of 2,500 in Merrill Gymnasium on Friday afternoon.

Spencer, who officially began work at Bates in July, was ceremonially installed as president in a celebration marked by glowing good wishes, a few tough facts and just enough pomp. Filling the gym were students, faculty, friends, Spencer’s predecessors as Bates president and 72 delegates representing colleges and universities from as far away as England.

Also on hand were Spencer’s family and friends — including her parents, who got a briefly teary shout-out from their daughter as she held the cap her father Sam had worn as president of Mary Baldwin and of Davidson colleges.

With a sleek stage, complete with giant video screens, the usually utilitarian Merrill was transformed for the occasion into a stunning ceremonial showcase. Michael Bonney ’80, chair of the Bates Board of Trustees, presided over a festivity that included music written and performed by faculty and students, formal greetings from diverse quarters and the ritual presentation of the symbols of the college — collar, record book and keys.

Complete video of the installation ceremony:

Bringing greetings from the students, for instance, Jacquelyn Holmes ’13 assured Spencer that “we will always be here for you — please lean on us, use us and keep us in the loop.”

Greetings from the Twin Cities came from mayors Jonathan LaBonté, of Auburn, and Robert Macdonald, of Lewiston, who offered a gracious verbal hand of friendship.

Representing the Academy, Williams College president and physics professor Adam Falk provided a useful reminder of Spencer’s contributions to higher education even before she got to Bates, as an aide to U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy, and as vice president for policy at Harvard.

Falk, who has seen Spencer in action through her service as a Williams trustee, told her that “you understand as well as anyone I know what makes colleges and universities work.”

Perhaps the deepest dish on the new president came from her former boss, Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust. She shared a droll summary of Spencer’s contribution to Harvard in the words of William Fitzsimmons, that university’s dean of admissions and financial aid: “Anything good that happened at Harvard from 1997 to 2012 was because of Spencer, and everything bad was something she objected to.”

Clayton Spencer speaks during her installation ceremony as the eighth president of Bates College on Friday, October 26, 2012.

More seriously, though, Faust traced Spencer’s bedrock dedication to justice to a Southern childhood lived during the height of the civil rights era, and named Harvard initiatives, such as the Crimson Summer Academy, through which that dedication has borne fruit. Through education, Faust said, Spencer has bent Martin Luther King Jr.’s moral arc of the universe a bit further toward justice.

Bates’ new president, she said, is the “embodiment of Bates values.”

Spencer began her own address with her predecessors at Bates, who faced their own exigent landscapes of change, crisis and opportunity. In our time, she said, the turbulence is driven by technology that is transforming both how colleges do their work, and how that work is evaluated outside academe.

“These qualities are in the DNA of Bates College.”

She used Benjamin E. Mays ’20, the great educator, theologian and civil rights leader, as a both a metaphor for the founding Bates ethos, and an illustration of applying that ethos in the coming times. Coming to Bates, she explained, Mays both benefited from and expanded Bates values.

Bates was founded, she said, “because, somehow, from our very beginnings, we encountered individuals in their full humanity. We took as our task educating them with intellectual rigor, ethical responsibility and care for their fellow human beings.”

“These qualities are in the DNA of Bates College, and they define us to this day. They also point the way forward.”

Mays’ example, too, illustrates both the focus on individual growth in the liberal arts model, and the role of community in nurturing that growth. “The most complete kind of human learning takes place in community, with the solidarity of companionship and the challenge of truth,” she said. And the most open and diverse community is the best kind of community to support learning.

“At Bates, we claim this union of excellence and opportunity as a core element of our identity, and we need to continue to build on this deep aspect of who we are.”

Bates’ eighth president concluded her inaugural address with a reference to the late Steve Jobs, who once told a group of graduating students that “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

“Likewise, at Bates, we don’t have time to waste,” she said. “But we are not in danger of living someone else’s life.  We know who we are and what we stand for, and we stand ready – together — to challenge ourselves and to engage the world.”

William Carlezon ’86, professor of psychiatry at Harvard University, speaks during the “Engaged Liberal Arts” panel discussion at Olin Arts Center Concert Hall on Oct. 26. At left is Bates English department chair Lillian Nayder. Photograph by Michael Bradley/Bates College.

There’s competition, said Michael Bonney, CEO of a company engaged in the high-pressure field of pharmaceuticals. And then there’s competition.

He explained the difference by contrasting two marketing strategies, one employed by a company he worked for 20 years ago and the other by the firm he now leads, Cubist Pharmaceuticals. In marketing a new drug, the first company attacked its drugmaking competition, focusing on the competitor’s weaknesses.

But Cubist, he said, goes after a different foe: human pain and suffering. Alleviating what ails us “is a much more enduring framework for defining success,” said Bonney, and one that’s much more motivating to Cubist employees.

An example of a “good fight” in the sense that World War II was a good war, Bonney’s story was a high point for many listeners during a panel discussion of the roles of competition and collaboration. That morning panel in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall was one of two, jointly presented as The Engaged Liberal Arts: The World of Ideas | Ideas in the World, designed to provide a conceptual complement to this afternoon’s inauguration of Bates’ eighth president, A. Clayton Spencer.

Bonney took part in the Ideas in the World segment, moderated by Harward Center Director Darby Ray. The other panelists were Andrew Byrnes ’05, Olympic gold and silver medalist with the Canadian men’s eight rowing team; and Francesco Duina, professor of sociology at Bates and author of the provocative study Winning: Reflections on an American Obsession.

That panel was preceded by the discussion The World of Ideas, moderated by Valerie Smith ’75, author, professor and dean of the college at Princeton. The panelists were Lillian Nayder, chair of the Bates English department and author of a pioneering biography of Charles Dickens’ wife, Catherine Hogarth; William Carlezon ’86, Harvard professor of psychiatry and director of McLean Hospital’s Behavioral Genetics Laboratory; and President Spencer’s former boss, historian and Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust.

If the themes for the two panels are complementary, the discussions themselves played out in distinctive ways. Smith would ask a specific question of each of her panelists in turn: What led you to the scholarly life? Where do your ideas come from? How does contemplation figure in your intellectual work?

That last question prompted one of the panel’s most interesting responses, shared by Faust and Nayder. Faust — whose Civil War history This Republic of Suffering was adapted for a recently aired public television series — revealed that she writes original drafts in longhand. “Writing is a way of learning and a haven of contemplation” for her, as the action of moving a pen over paper “sparks the process” of intellectual discovery.

Ideas in the World took a slightly different form and mood, as Ray began by asking Duina to lay our the premise of Winning — a book that argues that the American emphasis on winning and competition, as opposed to what the real stakes of the competition may be, may be inimical to real happiness.

His explanation kicked a lively, often laugh-filled volley of ideas and counter-ideas that ultimately concluded with the proposition that collaboration and competition aren’t mutually antagonistic nor even opposite. As Byrnes suggested, as he described how rowers compete when they train, then collaborate when they perform together in the greater competition, those two processes are just two related ways of reaching a goal.

The Rev. Peter Gomes ’65 is shown with members of his class during the Reunion parade in 2005. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Three members of the Bates faculty and the college’s multifaith chaplain offer a panel discussion titled The Intersecting Identities of the Reverend Peter Gomes ’65: Navigating Race, Religion, Sexuality and Politics  at noon Saturday, Oct. 27, in the Perry Atrium of Pettengill Hall, 4 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).

The discussion follows the Oct. 25 naming of the college’s century-old chapel after Gomes, a member of the Bates class of 1965 who served Harvard University as Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in The Memorial Church. Gomes, a beloved member of the Bates community and a nationally influential preacher, died in February 2011.

The Gomes events are part of the celebration of the Oct. 26 inauguration of A. Clayton Spencer as Bates’ eighth president. The Saturday panel is open to the public at no cost. Lunch will be served. No reservations are required.

The panel is sponsored by the Bates Alumni Council, the alumni organization Bates PRIDE, the Multifaith Chaplaincy and the Office of Intercultural Education, as well as the student organizations OutFront, which provides a forum for LGBT issues, and Amandla!, which promotes better understanding of the many communities of the African diaspora.

For more information, please email Melanie Mala Ghosh ’93 at mala_ghosh@hotmail.com or Larry Handerhan ’05 at larry.handerhan@gmail.com.

The panelists are Stephen Engel, assistant professor of politics; Myron Beasley, associate professor of African American studies and American cultural studies; and Bill Blaine-Wallace, multifaith chaplain. Leslie Hill, associate professor of politics, will moderate the panel.

Considered one of America’s most distinguished preachers by the 1970s (Time Magazine singled him out as one of “seven star preachers” in December 1979), Gomes became a prominent spiritual voice against intolerance after he announced in 1991 that he was gay.

“I now have an unambiguous vocation — a mission — to address the religious causes and roots of homophobia,” he told The Washington Post months later. “I will devote the rest of my life to addressing the ‘religious case’ against gays.”

Pursuit of that mission would include publication of the nationally best-selling books “The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Heart and Mind” and “Sermons: Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living in 2002,” even as Gomes’ writing and scholarship continued to extend into wider areas, noted The New York Times, such as early American religions, Elizabethan Puritanism, church music and the African-American experience.

In a 1987 profile in Bates Magazine, Gomes said that that his famous embrace of tradition, ritual and history reflected his belief that the Christian church is most alive when it is passing enduring “ideals and ideas” from one generation to the next.

“What I’m interested in are those truths, values and commitments that make people respond to the ultimate hopes, ultimate goods,” he said.

In turn, Gomes added, the human battle between justice and oppression cannot be measured in our own moment. “If we did everything for our own time and our own generation, and expected to see results, nothing of worth would get done,” he said. “That’s why I’m in it for the long haul.”

A former Bates trustee who served on the board for more than two decades, Gomes received the Benjamin E. Mays Medal from the Bates Alumni Association in 1998 and delivered the college’s Sesquicentennial address in 2005.

Bates President A. Clayton Spencer

Bates will formally welcome its new president, A. Clayton Spencer, this week with events culminating in her inauguration the afternoon of Friday, Oct. 26, in Merrill Gymnasium.

The inauguration ceremony, which begins at 2:30 p.m., will be streamed live on the Bates website.  The college expects as many as 2,500 members of the Bates community and invited guests to attend.

Spencer was elected president by the college’s Board of Trustees in December 2011 and took office July 1.

The inauguration ceremony will begin with a colorful procession in academic regalia by Bates faculty members, administrative leaders, students, delegates and others, led by a bagpiper and macebearer from Bates’ New Commons building across Central Avenue into Merrill Gymnasium. The delegates (including a number of other college presidents) will represent more than 70 other colleges and universities as well as learned societies.

See the complete schedule of Inauguration Week events.

Running approximately an hour and a half, the ceremony will center around the formal installation of Spencer and the delivery of her inaugural address, Questions Worth Asking.

Spencer will be introduced by Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard University, where Spencer was a key member of the leadership team for 15 years before accepting the presidency of Bates.

Michael W. Bonney ’80, chair of the Board of Trustees, will conduct the installation, which includes presentation of historical symbols of the office, some handcrafted, including the presidential collar, a record book from the college’s founding days and a set of keys.

Preliminaries to the central events include a welcome by Bonney, an invocation and various “Greetings to the President” — brief salutations delivered by representatives of the Bates student body, faculty, staff, alumni, the mayors of Bates’ hometown of Lewiston and its twin city Auburn, and the academic world.

Bates student instrumentalists and vocalists under the direction of members of the music faculty will present musical works throughout the program, including three composed for the occasion by members of the music faculty.

The inauguration ceremony itself will be preceded by two related major events and followed by one other:

• Thursday, Oct. 25, in a service beginning at 4:15 p.m., the Bates Chapel, which has existed under that name for exactly a century, will acquire a new name — The Peter J. Gomes Chapel.  A 1965 graduate of Bates who died last February at age 68, Gomes was widely known for his career as the longtime Pusey Minister in The Memorial Church at Harvard. The chapel’s new name honors his life and work, which advanced an array of values Bates also supports. Like the inauguration, the naming service, in the chapel, will be an event for the Bates community and invited guests only, but will also be streamed live on the college’s website.

• Friday, Oct. 26, from 9:30 a.m. to noon, the college will present back-to-back panel discussions on The Engaged Liberal Arts: The World of Ideas and Ideas in the World. Taking place in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, these discussions will examine how important ideas are born as well as how they get applied through both competition and collaboration.  Panelists will include President Faust along with other widely noted speakers. This event will be open to the public at no charge.

• Saturday evening, Oct. 27, rapper/singer/songwriter Dev will present a special free concert exclusively for the Bates community. The concert concludes inauguration activities.

Two days of annual Homecoming events will also take place on campus Friday and Saturday, adding to an atmosphere of festivity and excitement.