By Doug Hubley

In 1986, about a dozen Bates people found themselves deep in rural South Carolina looking at a shack.

They were looking at a shack, but seeing the starting point of a journey whose consequences were nothing short of transformational for a man and for a nation.

Benjamin Mays ’20, photographed in 1980 when he returned to Bates for his 60th Reunion. Photograph by Jim Daniels.

The shack was the Greenwood County birthplace of Benjamin E. Mays ’20, the civil rights theorist, educator, preacher, Morehouse College president and mentor to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — in short, schoolmaster to the civil rights movement, to paraphrase recent Mays biographer Randal M. Jelks.

The Bates group comprised students in a Short Term religion course investigating the black church in America. For them, the shack near Epworth, S.C., was one seminal stop in a Southern itinerary that resembled a kind of “Benjamin Mays Tour” because Mays was linked to so many of its destinations.

There in the countryside, the visitors from Bates were closing a circle. They were learning about a man who might have had a much different life, perhaps a less consequential life, without Bates. Bates had shaped Mays, and now his legacy was shaping these students, and back through them, the college itself.

Even 29 years after Mays passed away, that circle remains intact. Many people know of Bates because of the college’s influence on his life. And Mays’ influence is more present than ever on campus, whether expressed in the college mission statement, or in the recollections of Bates people who knew him, or in campus speeches, notably the Oct. 26 inaugural address by Clayton Spencer (see page 38).

Former slaves, Mays’ parents were sharecroppers. Their dwelling has since been moved to the Dr. Benjamin E. Mays Historic Preservation Site, in Greenwood, S.C., but when the Bates group visited, it was “out in the middle of a field,” recalls Associate Dean of Students James Reese, who was part of the group led by an acting college chaplain, Rob Stuart.

“Personal and political freedom and formal education were inextricably bound together for Mays.”

The group talked about starting life in that field in the Jim Crow era — Mays’ earliest memory was of a white mob threatening his father — and ultimately heading off to Maine for a college that promised something better. In 1986, the distance from Greenwood to Lewiston “was palpable,” Reese says.

“But in 1917, it was like going across the universe. That really resonated with us.”

In that year, Mays entered Bates as a 23-year-old sophomore after a year at Virginia Union University, where two Bates alumni on the faculty encouraged him to try their alma mater. Starting with a friendly encounter with a Bates student on the train coming north, Mays was pleasantly surprised to discover that racism in Lewiston was more the exception than the rule.

Mays poses with his 1919 debate teammates. Mays’ drive to succeed academically came from wanting to prove “that superiority or inferiority in academic achievement had nothing to do with color of skin,” he wrote in Born to Rebel. Front row, from left, Arthur F. Lucas ’20, Robert B. Watts ’22, Edward H. Brewster ’19; back row, Charles M. Starbird ’21, Benjamin E. Mays ’20, Charles P. Mayoh ’19. Photograph courtesy of Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

Mays came here not only for a better education than a person of color could reasonably expect down South, but to prove his intellectual equality to whites. “How could I know I was not inferior to the white man, having never had a chance to compete with him?” Mays recalled in Born to Rebel, his 1971 autobiography.

Proof soon abounded. He won a speaking award in his first year at Bates, finished his senior year as captain of a triumphant debate team and was one of 15 in his class to graduate with honors, among other achievements.

“I concede academic superiority to not more than four in my class,” he wrote in Born to Rebel. “I displayed more initiative as a student leader than the majority of my classmates. Bates College made these things possible.”

At Bates, Mays “found a way to chart a course in which he could find the intellectual resources he needed, gain confidence in his ability and then to leave to do extraordinary things,” says Marcus Bruce ’77, who is the inaugural Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at Bates.

Or as Mays himself famously summed up his experience in Born to Rebel: “Bates College did not ‘emancipate’ me: it did the far greater service of making it possible for me to emancipate myself, to accept with dignity my own worth as a free man.”

He later earned advanced degrees at the University of Chicago, but it was at Bates that he laid the groundwork for “a new biblical interpretation that could mobilize black communities to take action against Jim Crow’s enforced apathy,” Jelks writes in the 2012 Mays biography Schoolmaster of the Movement. Mays’ studies in religion steered him toward an intellectual structure for both his profound Baptist faith and his personal mission “to uplift his people,” as Jelks puts it.

In the writings of theologian Walter Rauschenbusch and others, Mays learned about the Social Gospel, a Protestant movement that advocated for a church that would actively address societal ills — of which there was none more exigent to Mays than American racism.

Mays later came to understand the Church as central to both the persistence of racism and its amelioration. Racist whites cited Scripture to defend their prejudice, and blacks used the Church to defend their sanity and solidarity. And in that unity also lay the foundation for a civil rights movement.

Mays delivers the final eulogy for the slain Martin Luther King Jr. on April 9, 1968, at Morehouse College. Photograph courtesy of Howard University.

Mays saw in certain Baptist tenets — “freedom of conscience, the dignity and worth of every man, each man’s individual right of direct access to God,” in his words — a moral basis for the powerful rebuttal to racism that he would promulgate to generations of students. Especially during his tenure as Morehouse president, from 1940 to 1967, he “laid the intellectual groundwork for social change throughout the South among black churchgoing college students,” Jelks writes.

Both resounding and intellectually sound, Mays’ rhetoric was the ammunition that these students needed to overturn the racist discourse of the Jim Crow South. Mays, says Bruce, “employed and deployed religious rhetoric to address urgent issues of religious, political and social importance. This is certainly one of the lessons that he passed along to his student, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” as well as to such political and civil rights leaders as Julian Bond and Andrew Young.

People who know about Benjamin Mays tend to know about Bates.

James Reese, who was a child when he first encountered Mays, at a college football game in Knoxville, Tenn., has stayed close to Mays’ legacy. Reese accompanied former Bates President Elaine Tuttle Hansen to Greenwood in 2011 when she spoke at the dedication of the Mays Historic Preservation Site.

Hansen explained to an attentive audience that Bates, in rewriting its mission statement in 2010, had tipped its mortarboard to Mays by declaring itself “dedicated to the emancipating potential of the liberal arts.”

“That really resonated with the audience,” Reese recalls. “They leaned back, confident that Bates understood what Dr. Mays was about. I was so glad to be there for that moment.” In fact, Reese points out, people who know about Mays tend to know about Bates. The warm relationship between Morehouse and Bates has roots in his story; and Reese even has an anecdote about bringing his parents to visit a friend whose hospitality suddenly blossomed when she learned he worked at Bates.

In June 1963, Mays and then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson confer while en route to the state funeral of Pope John XIII. Yoichi Okamoto/LBJ Presidential Library

If Bates is known elsewhere because of its role in Mays’ achievements, those achievements keep Mays alive in the campus consciousness. He is much in evidence when Bates observes Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which always includes a debate with Morehouse. Bates named its Residential Village campus center for Mays, adding to a list of monuments around the nation that includes an elaborate memorial, incorporating a statue and Mays’ tomb, at Morehouse.

Most important, Mays lived and taught values that Bates calls its own. Other Northern institutions refused Mays admission due to race, but Bates has always been open to all races.

“Personal and political freedom and formal education were inextricably bound together” for Mays, Jelks writes; so they are here.

In this undated photo, Mays talks with baseball great Hank Aaron of the Atlanta Braves. Photograph courtesy of Howard University.

Mays’ passion was social engagement; his scope was global — Gandhi, whom he met, was influential in his thinking. And his style was audacious. These are all Bates hallmarks.

“Exploring the legacy of Mays is a way to discover something about Bates as well,” says Bruce. “He continues to help us understand who we are as an institution, and the kind of education we provided in the past, and can provide in the future.”

The revised mission statement, Bruce says, presents the liberal arts education “as being about emancipation, freeing yourself from certain kinds of fears, or conventions, or ideas that are limiting. It enables you to see, and think, and live in new ways.” And if most of today’s students will likely never face the difficulties experienced by minorities back in the bad old days, the determination that Mays forged in the struggle remains inspirational.

“He’s an extraordinary example of faith, of fortitude, of persistence and clarity of vision,” Bruce says. “Bates provided an opportunity for him, but at the same time he continues to provide us with a great deal. It’s just a matter of exploring his legacy.”

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.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day keynote speaker Barbara Savage at the podium in the Olin Concert Hall.

“Can we keep the faith when our dreams are imperfectly realized? I hope that we can.”

Monday was an especially fitting day for this question posed by historian Barbara Savage as she concluded her keynote speech for Bates’ Martin Luther King Jr. Day observances. The unifying theme for this year’s day of special programs was “Faith and Ethics in the Public Sphere: What is the Dream?” Savage’s address looked hard at a dream that Benjamin Mays ’20, the theologian, mentor to King and civil rights leader, had all his life: that the church could model integration for U.S. society at large.

Mays’ dream was not realized, leading to Savage’s expression of hope for faith’s power of endurance. That sentiment would resonate under any circumstances, but on this snowy Monday at Bates, where everyone was sobered by the tragedy of the Haitian earthquake, Savage’s closing was especially poignant.

Haiti, in fact, claimed an unbilled spot on the keynote presentation agenda, which was attended by about 200 people in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall and opened by music from the Bates Jazz Band. Sophomore Eric Mathieu, who lives in New York state but has relatives in Haiti, made an appeal for disaster relief funds

• Read student impressions of King Day programming at Bates.
• See a multimedia presentation about Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2010 at Bates:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Amandla! sponsored the workshop “21st-Century African American Leadership.”

Savage, a historian and the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke after remarks by Bates President Elaine Tuttle Hansen and Dean of the Faculty Jill Reich. Titled “Benjamin Mays and the Politics of Black Religion in the Age of Desegregation,” Savage’s address used Mays to illustrate some of the historic forces that helped shape, and constrain, the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century.

Inspired, in part, by extensive travels abroad, Mays believed that a racially integrated American Christian church could point the way to integration in the political and social spheres as well. Savage showed how Mays’ encounters with theologians and philosophers outside the U.S. — Gandhi, Muslim critics of Christianity, the would-be utopians of the 1937 Oxford Conference — shaped and annealed this ideal.

As a Southern, black, religious liberal, Savage explained, Mays had a complex case of the kind of “multiple consciousness” developed by people who live in worlds that do not overlap. “Perhaps the advantage of a multiple consciousness is a learned aptitude for abiding with irreconcilable contradictions,” she noted.

So even as Mays witnessed and advocated for a worldwide religious movement for social justice and racial integration, he understood that churches in the United States — which above all express the attitudes of their parishioners, both black and white — might stubbornly choose to remain segregated.

“He argued that Christianity ought to be color-blind and desegregated,” Savage said, “while at the same time he adhered to a belief in the political necessity of black-controlled institutions, especially churches and colleges.”

Ultimately, the contradictions prevailed. If the 1960s offered “a glimpse of the possibility of realization” of Mays’ dreams and ideals, Savage said, the last years of his life were marked mostly with personal disappointment and disillusionment about the goal of integration, especially in terms of black cultural and political identity. The trouble with integration, he told one audience, is that “it always moved from black to white and never from white to black.”

Citing Martin Luther King’s observation that among churchgoing Americans, 11 o’clock Sunday morning remains the “most segregated hour in this nation,” Savage noted that the ” ‘race church’ remains a fact of American life” and Mays’ “search for a progressive politics of religious globalism remains as elusive as during his long life.”

So if Mays’ adherence to these ideals represents a particularly American optimism, a faith in democracy and progress, as Savage suggested, this chapter of Mays’ story is nevertheless more of a cautionary tale.

As she said in her conclusion, “All of this is evidence of the necessity to shift and rethink our own dreams and our own ideas, and to realize that dreams are often incompletely and imperfectly realized.”

Junot Díaz, whose novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, signs books for students after offering a lecture in the Benjamin Mays Center. Part of the Arturo Schomburg Afro-Latino Speaker Series at Bates, the talk was sponsored by the Office of Multicultural Affairs.[intlink id="2641" type="post"] More.[/intlink]

Not the viewbook Bates where faculty and students scale ever-higher peaks of achievement. Instead, a more prosaic place where, in back offices, kitchens, and workshops, College staffers make the academic fireworks possible.

And it’s a place whose achievements, perhaps, reflect what Benjamin Mays ’20 had in mind when he exhorted mourners at King’s funeral to make the civil rights leader’s unfinished work “truly our own.”

President Hansen considers a comment during the King Day workshop on diversity efforts in the Bates workplace. At right is Ellen Peters ’87, director of the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

President Elaine Tuttle Hansen convened “Institutionalizing Unfinished Work” to illuminate those achievements. As Bates has striven to make the campus more diverse and inclusive, Hansen explained, she has been struck by the intensity College staffers have brought to that effort. For the MLK Day workshop, she asked seven College administrators to share challenges and revelations they’ve encountered along the way.

The King holiday, Hansen said later, afforded a plum opportunity “to explore all the places on campus where people really are trying to do the unfinished work of social justice and inclusion.”

We heard from Carmita McCoy, who is helping Bates develop a concept from the Benjamin Mays Initiative: “swing deans” who help recruit a new class for Admissions one year, then spend the next year as a dean of students mentoring that same class, especially members of underrepresented groups.

Something she hadn’t expected, she explained, was the concern some African American parents expressed that their children wouldn’t be able to maintain their faith practices at Bates.

Bob Pallone, who works in Advancement, wondered how to convince alums of color that today’s Bates is more welcoming than the one they knew. “How do we understand what they experienced?” he asked. “And how do we convey what’s happening now?”

The diversity of diversities resonated throughout the workshop. In realigning staff assignments for the new dining Commons, said Dining Services head Christine Schwartz, she has encouraged her people to try out for jobs they really want.

Implementing this enlightened policy, though, sometimes brought Schwartz up against the effects of old, harsh inequalities — such as a worker who had gone through public school labeled as a special-ed student on the basis of a single, specific disability.

The diversity of diversities includes job classification. As Carmen Purdy, a presenter and the coordinator of the affirmative action office, pointed out, Bates staff feel empowered simply to be heard.

The convener agreed. “I talk about Bates all the time, and I rarely have an opportunity to talk publicly about people who are behind the scenes,” Hansen said afterward. “Quite invisible but so important to the college, just kind of making everything else happen.”

Including, now more than ever, some unfinished work that just can’t wait.

The Rev. John Mendez, pastor of the Emmanuel Baptist Church, Winston-Salem, N.C., and the Winston-Salem Chronicle’s 1994 Man of the Year, is the keynote speaker for the 2005 Martin Luther King Jr. Day observances at Bates College. Classes at the college are canceled and special programming is scheduled throughout the day with an emphasis on the theme From Montgomery to Memphis: Martin Luther King’s Legacy of Labor, Justice and Dignity.

Scheduled for 10:45 a.m. Monday, Jan. 17, in the Bates College Chapel, Mendez’s address is part of a celebration of King’s life and work that includes performances, workshops, exhibitions and a debate with Bates, Morehouse and Spelman college participants. All events are open to the public free of charge. For more information, call 207-786-6400 or see a complete list of scheduled events for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

On the eve of King’s 1968 assassination, the civil rights leader was in Memphis, Tenn., organizing striking sanitation workers and planning for a poor-people’s march in the nation’s capital. King’s support for non-unionized labor is a central component of his legacy that is often overlooked, says John McClendon, associate professor of African American and American cultural studies at Bates. Chaired by McClendon, the Bates committee that organizes the annual observance of King’s birthday chose to recognize King’s commitment to labor as this year’s theme.

MLK Day events at Bates start with an opening reception at 4:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 14, in Chase Hall Gallery, Campus Avenue, for Unfree Labor and the Production of Language: An Exhibition of Words, a display curated by Czerny Brasuell, director of multicultural affairs, and Baltasar Fra-Molinero, associate professor of Spanish. On display through Jan. 24, the exhibition showcases artifacts reflecting the Creole languages that arose as a result of slavery and the African diaspora.

In a second exhibition honoring King’s birthday and Black History Month, the college displays The Photography of Griffith Jerome Davis from Jan. 10 to Feb. 15 in the George and Helen Ladd Library. The first roving editor for Ebony Magazine, Davis was a photojournalist and U.S. foreign service officer who was mentored by the Morehouse College President Benjamin Mays, Bates Class of 1920. The exhibition includes images from the U.S. civil rights movement, the independence movements of Africa and African American life in segregated Atlanta. Davis’ daughter, Dorothy Davis, will speak about his life and work at 4:45 p.m. Monday, Jan. 17, in Ladd Library.

The college also co-sponsors an annual MLK Day Read-In where faculty, staff, students and members of the community will share a picture book with Martel School students in grades 4-6 at 1 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 20, and Friday, Jan. 21. Those interested in volunteering should e-mail Brooke Miller at this bmiller@bates.edu or call 207-786-8273.

The King Day observance begins on the eve of the holiday, at 7 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 16, with a memorial service of worship, including a sermon and music,  in the College Chapel, College Street.

Student debaters from Bates, Morehouse and Spelman colleges kick off King Day itself when they argue the topic, “College Employees Should Unionize.” The debaters will be introduced at 9 a.m. Monday, Jan. 17,  in Chase Hall Lounge, Campus Avenue.

The debate will begin at 9:30 a.m. The match has historic resonance for the schools, which share a continuing commitment to collaborative projects. Founded in 1881, Spelman is one of the nation’s most highly regarded colleges for women. The nation’s largest liberal arts college for men, Morehouse was Martin Luther King Jr.’s alma mater. One of its longtime presidents was Bates graduate and accomplished debater Benjamin Mays,  a lifelong adviser to the great civil rights leader and the assassinated King’s eulogizer in 1968.

The Rev. John Mendez delivers his 10:45 a.m. keynote address in the Bates College Chapel.

A native of New York City, Mendez has pastored the Emmanuel Baptist Church in Winston-Salem for the past 21 years. Noted for his contributions to civil and human rights, Mendez has served as a consultant on many fact-finding missions, including investigations of Hawaiian land rights; pollution on Vieques Island, Puerto Rico; U.S. war crimes in Nicaragua and El Salvador; peace initiatives in Angola; the Mount Graham Apache Sacred Site; and the land rights of the Black Hills Lakota.

Widely recognized for his activism and community service, Mendez has received the Wendell-Wake County NAACP Humanitarian Award, the President’s Award of the Winston-Salem NAACP and Honorary Keeper of the Constitution given by the North Carolina Secretary of State.

An experienced lecturer, Mendez is a founding member of Re-framing the Dialogue on Racism, an organization that recruits, trains and builds a community of 100 white clergy from different denominations across the country to create strategies, ministries and programs at the congregational level that address racism in the white community.

Mendez participated in a pilot project on the black church’s economic responsibility for a new urban agenda at the Harvard University Divinity School. Mendez is a graduate of Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C.; Southeastern Baptist Theological Center in Atlanta, Ga; and the New York-based Postgraduate Center of Mental Health in pastoral counseling, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

A series of concurrent Monday afternoon workshops hosted by various academic departments and student organizations begins at 1:15, 2:30 and 3:35 p.m. respectively in Pettengill Hall in classrooms throughout the building. The workshops, featuring speakers and discussion, will focus on labor justice. Topics range from the life of 19th-century African American Bates alumna Stella James Sims to the interaction between King-era social activism and labor, from Lewiston labor history to impacts of the Vietnam War on the U.S. working class. For more information about the workshops, call 207-786-6400 or see a complete listing.

The afternoon’s events culminate with Dorothy Davis’ 4:45 p.m. talk in Ladd Library about her father, Griffith Jerome Davis, and his life, work and close connection to Morehouse College president Benjamin Mays ’20. A pathfinder in the field of international public affairs and special events, Ms. Davis has built international platforms for dialogue to promote respect for cultural differences. Her multicultural consulting firm, The Diasporan Touch, extends her commitment to build bridges between people, cultures and issues worldwide. The firm’s clients include the Executive Office of the Secretary General of the United Nations, the World Health Organization and The Alliance of Mayors and Municipal Leaders on HIV/AIDS in Africa. Davis also manages and curates “Photos by Griff Davis,” her father’s 55,000 photographic images.

The entire King Day observance concludes with a performance at 7:30 p.m. in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall featuring The Fruit of Labor Singing Ensemble, the cultural arm of the civil rights and worker rights organization Black Workers for Justice. The six-member group performs songs from the history of people’s movements for social change, using African American music styles of rhythm & blues, gospel, reggae, jazz, folk, work songs and chants. The ensemble’s interactive performance includes a video presentation and invites audience participation.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. described Mays as “my spiritual mentor and my intellectual father.” Mays, a child of freed slaves, was president of Morehouse College in Atlanta from 1940 to 1967. He died in 1984.

“Intellectual inquiry and a commitment to individual worth and equality of access are at the core of education and of a just community,” said Bates College President Donald W. Harward in announcing the gift. ”

The establishment at Bates of the Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Visiting Professorship confirms these basic cultural and academic values – values made manifest in the work and legacy of Dr. Mays. Nothing could be more profoundly central to the college. We are deeply grateful to Jim Orr and his family for making possible this significant addition to the college.”

The Mays Distinguished Visiting Professorship will not be limited to one field but will support varying terms of appointment in different fields of inquiry for visiting faculty of national and international recognition.

“We are pleased to support the establishment of an ongoing commitment to the very best of what Bates and a liberal education provides,” Orr said, “and to do so in a way that recognizes Dr. Mays — one of the most important leaders in society and in higher education.”

Orr is president and chief executive officer of United Asset Management Corp. of Boston. He currently chairs the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation, which is dedicated to improving the lives of the world’s poor through science, technology, research and analysis. He is former chairman and CEO of UnumProvident Corp. of Portland, Maine, and Chattanooga, Tenn. In his role as Bates College trustee, Orr has co-chaired the current Bates Presidential Search Committee.

Orr and his wife, Ann Langreth Orr, live in Falmouth, Maine, and Boston. Their daughter, Brooke, is a 1994 graduate of Bates; their second daughter, Sage, is a 2001 graduate of Bowdoin.

President Harward said that Mays’ reflection on his Bates experience in his autobiography could serve as a refrain for a liberal education. “Bates didn’t emancipate me; I emancipated myself,” Mays said. “Bates provided the much greater service of providing the context which supported my choice to be free.”

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. described Mays as “my spiritual mentor and my intellectual father.”

“As time goes on, Dr. Mays continues to stand out as an incredible example of faith and belief in America and the American dream,” Cleland, a Democrat, told The Atlanta Journal Constitution recently. “Plus, he was a civil and human rights leader and a public theologian. He just was an incredible human being.”

The Presidential Medal of Freedom honors those who have made “especially meritorious” contributions to national security, world peace or cultural, public or private endeavors. If the Senate approves the measure, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) would introduce it in the House. If approved there, it would then go to Bush for his signature. In 1984, then-President Reagan failed to grant Mays the Presidential Medal of Freedom, despite intense lobbying and unanimous approval by Congress. Mays died March 28, 1984, two days after the White House ceremony honoring 14 other honorees.