Last spring, Bates, Colby and Bowdoin colleges channeled their long-standing rivalry for altruistic purposes. The three schools competed to collect the most books to donate to the Polytechnic University of Kabul, in Afghanistan.

A Bates student, Kabul native Mustafa Basij-Rasikh ’12, launched the project in an effort to restock the university’s library, left critically short of English literature and textbooks.

The book drive collected more than 2,000 books in a variety of disciplines, including math, science, sociology, history, and women and gender studies. Bates raised the most books, with a total of 41 boxes. Colby ranked second with 33 boxes, and Bowdoin came in third with a total of 22 boxes.

Bates alum Chris Robinson ’07 and other friends of the colleges contributed by picking up the tab for shipping costs.

The Polytechnic University of Kabul, the second-largest university in the city, was established in 1963. Like many major institutions in Afghanistan, government inattention, violent conflict and constant upheaval during the past three decades have left the university lacking many basic resources.

“All in all, everyone was incredibly grateful for the donations,” said Basij-Rasikh, “and is looking forward to expand the program if possible.”

Along with the book drive and an initiative supporting land mine victims, Basij-Rasikh worked with Matiullah Amin, an Afghanistan native who is now a junior at Williams College, to found the Afghan Youth Initiative this summer. This nonprofit, non-governmental organization aims to build a peaceful and prosperous Afghanistan by empowering today’s youth.

A national foundation that supports liberal arts education has awarded nearly $150,000 to Bates and Bowdoin colleges for a collaborative effort to strengthen students’ quantitative reasoning skills.

The New York-based Teagle Foundation has granted the colleges $148,780 for a three-year project exploring effective ways to teach quantitative reasoning. The foundation’s Systematic Improvement in Student Learning initiative will support the schools’ efforts to develop techniques for assessing students’ progress in such reasoning. It’s hoped that these assessments will provide a basis for developing best practices in curriculum and teaching techniques.

“Quantitative reasoning” refers to the application of quantitative skills, such as computation, in the interpretation of ideas and the formation of arguments in any subject. Effective quantitative reasoning requires the development of such mental habits as thinking logically and basing decisions upon evidence.

“We live in a technologically driven society, and students must be able to reason quantitatively in order to participate fully in that society,” says Matt Côté, who is coordinating the project for Bates College. Côté is an associate professor of chemistry and associate dean of the faculty.

“Much of a liberal arts education is about thinking well, reasoning well and presenting an argument. In many contexts quantitative reasoning is central to those processes.”

The two colleges plan to measure the reasoning skills of students at three points in their academic careers: upon arrival as first-year students, near the completion of their first quantitative reasoning course and just prior to graduation. At each stage, a combination of quantitative and qualitative tools will be used to gauge students’ skills and their effectiveness in applying those skills when reasoning from evidence.

These assessments will give Bates and Bowdoin the data and the insights necessary to improve how such reasoning is taught, Côté explains. “We want to figure out which aspects of our efforts to enhance students’ quantitative reasoning are most effective and where there is room for improvement. Our assessment efforts will provide concrete information about what form those improvements ought to take.”

The grant comes at a crucial time for both schools, says Nancy Jennings, chair of Bowdoin’s education department. “We’ve already done preliminary work in making a transition in our general education requirements from a focus on quantitative skills to quantitative reasoning,” says Jennings.

“Faculty who teach quantitative reasoning courses have had some discussions about what the new focus includes and what our aims are, but we haven’t had the time or resources to thoughtfully and systematically put all the pieces together yet, especially the assessment piece. That we can now do this thoughtful, systematic work collaboratively with colleagues from Bates just means the discussions and outcomes will be that much richer.”

The Teagle support will also advance the colleges’ participation in the regional New England Consortium on Assessment and Student Learning initiative and, more broadly, enable Bowdoin and Bates to share their findings with wider national audiences.

The Teagle Foundation provides leadership for liberal education, marshalling intellectual and financial resources needed to ensure student access to challenging, wide-ranging and enriching college educations. The foundation emphasizes measurement-based approaches to educational improvements and the broad dissemination of project results. Learn more.

– Doug Hubley, Office of Communications and Media Relation

The Bates College softball team celebrates an 8-1 NESCAC East Division victory against rival Bowdoin.

With 4:34 remaining in the first half of the men’s basketball game vs. Bowdoin on Jan. 23, 2009, Neil Creahan ’10 of Hingham, Mass., drives between Bowdoin defenders and dishes to Jimmy O’Keefe ’10 (not pictured) of Lexington, Mass., for the layup. “The play was for Neil to go one-on-one, to let him operate,” explains head coach Jon Furbush ’05. Creahan picks up the story: “I beat my man, then was met by the second line of defense. With two guys on me, I found O’Keefe on the basket.” The Bobcats won, 57–54, giving Furbush his initial NESCAC coaching victory before a rambunctious home crowd in Alumni Gym.

Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen

Colby, Bates and Bowdoin colleges have received a $280,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to build a model program for the collaborative development of library collections. The plan is to share collection resources in all formats, electronic and print, reduce unnecessary duplication and redundant purchases, and make a broader universe of materials available at each campus.

Previous grants from the Mellon Foundation to the three schools, which are collectively called “CBB,” have helped build a service framework for collection sharing, enabling the libraries to develop technologies to share catalogs and support interlibrary loan activity.

The goals of the current project will bring collaboration among the three libraries to the next level. The libraries plan to determine how to expand the collection of materials available to the CBB academic communities, share budgetary and space resources so that all three libraries can operate more cost-effectively, and build a faculty culture that embraces the plan.

“CBB libraries have established a distinguished track record of resource-sharing,” notes Gene Wiemers, vice president for information and library services at Bates College. “We recognize the strategic advantage to three small colleges to combine the strengths of our research collections. This project gives us the resources to plan and shape our collections to make our libraries meet even more of our needs.”

The grant will be used over two years to hire two temporary librarians who will enable current staff to devote time to the project.

“We need the time,” says Bowdoin College Librarian Sherrie Bergman. “We need the project work to be conducted by librarians who have established collegial relations with faculty members and who are knowledgeable about the research and curricular needs of our faculty and students.”

The CBB librarians are identifying areas of historical curricular and collection strength for each school and each college. Four pilot curricular areas are being selected to begin the project, which ultimately will span all disciplinary areas and all subject areas of the collections. The pilot areas will be among those that are taught at all three schools, place budgetary pressures on their respective libraries, and are interdisciplinary in nature.

The libraries are using software tools to analyze areas of collection strength and overlap, measured against current and projected curricular needs. The tools offer collection comparisons on such parameters as collection age, format and past circulation. The data analysis will support development of new approaches to collection development, weeding, cancellation, print archiving and preservation activities.

The libraries will be working in new ways with vendors for the acquisition of new materials. They will develop joint monographic approval plans with the goal of acquiring a larger number of unique book titles, and test new models for the development of shared journal and electronic book collections.

Because collection-building strategies differ among the disciplines, librarians will consult closely with academic departments and individual faculty members on the three campuses. They will discuss curricular concentrations and collection strengths, overlaps and gaps to achieve increased collection breadth at each school. Space limitations at each library make it logical also to consider cooperative de-accessioning, print archiving and off-site storage agreements.

In the second year of the grant, the model book approval plan will be extended to all appropriate subject areas, and the libraries will write a joint collection management document that presents the strategic vision for a shared collection plan. They also will review benchmark data to measure the success of the new model plan to bring more unique materials to each school.

Project librarians say the enthusiasm and high satisfaction with resource-sharing among faculty and students make the collaboration possible. Results of the project will be widely disseminated among the library community with the hope that the CBB partnership can serve as a model for other library collaborations.

Franklin Burroughs, author of the acclaimed books Billy Watson’s Croker Sack (W.W. Norton, 1991) and The River Home: A Return to the Carolina Low Country (University of Georgia Press; first published in 1992 as Horry and the Waccamaw), visits Bates College to give the eighth annual Otis Lecture at 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 9, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

The title of Burroughs’ talk is Landscapes: The Mind’s Eye and the Inner Ear. Made possible through the Philip J. Otis Endowment, the lecture is open to the public at no cost. (Please note that the printed Bates Invites You calendar for March erroneously lists a second event at Muskie for this evening. In fact, the lecture by Liyakat Takim will be held in Chase Lounge at 7:30 p.m.)

The recently retired Harrison McCann Professor of the English Language at Bowdoin, Burroughs is nationally known as an essayist focusing on connections between human and natural histories.

For more than 20 years his essays have appeared in some of the most important American journals and reviews, such as The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review and Harpers Magazine. Many of his essays have been included in the annual compilation Best American Essays, and Burroughs is represented in the Norton Anthology of Nature Writing and various Maine publications.

Burroughs is known for the books The River Home recounting his 1985 canoe trip on the Waccamaw River in his native South Carolina; and Billy Watson’s Croker Sack, a collection of essays focusing on hunting, fishing and the rural life.

Burroughs began teaching at Bowdoin in 1968 following his work for the Ph.D. at Harvard University. He received his baccalaureate from the University of the South in 1964.

The annual Otis Lecture at Bates is funded by the Philip J. Otis Endowment, established in 1996 by a gift from Margaret V.B. and C. Angus Wurtele in memory of their son, Philip, a member of the class of 1995 who died attempting to rescue injured climbers on Mount Rainier.

In recognition of Otis’ appreciation for nature, the endowment helps support Bates programs with an environmental focus, in particular those exploring the spiritual and moral dimensions of humanity’s relationship with the environment.

The panels will be organized around several themes: the political economy of social and environmental sciences, scientific knowledge and discourses of difference, modernity and medicine and natural vs. national science.

Michelle Rowley, assistant lecturer in the gender and development studies program, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad, will deliver the keynote address “Border Conversations: Interrogating the Seams of Science” at 3:15 p.m. A roundtable discussion, moderated by Rowley, will follow the talk.

The conference begins at 9 a.m with introductory remarks, followed by the first panel, “The Political Economy of Social and Environmental Sciences. Participants include Bates senior Bradley Wilson, on “Producing Sustainable Coffee”; Rachel Narehood Austin, assistant professor of chemistry and environmental studies, Bates College, on “A Post-Modern Approach to Assessing Environmental Risk: Gauging the Human Health Risks Posed by Lead Exposure”; and Lillian Guerra, assistant professor of history, Bates College, on “Cuba, Cubans and the Harvard Summer School for Cuban Teachers: Making a Science of Civilization.”

The second panel, “Natural/National Science, Modernity and Medicine,” begins at 11 a.m. Panelists are Scott MacEachern, associate professor of anthropology, Bowdoin College, on “Genes, Tribes and African History”; Susan Bell, professor of sociology, Bowdoin College, on “Sexuality, Culture and Social Change: Connecting ‘Women’; and ‘Science’ in Microbicide Research”; and Kiran Asher, assistant professor of political science and women’s studies, Bates College, on “The ‘Global Environment’ Discourse and Biodiversity Research in Columbia.”

Following a break for lunch, the third 90-minute panel, “Scientific Knowledge and Discourses of Difference,” begins at 1 p.m. with Anindyo Roy, assistant professor of English, Colby College, on “Labor Visibility and the Colonial Apparatus: The Case of Leonard Woolf”; NeEddra James, a Bowdoin College religion major, on “Imaging and Imagining the Black Female Subject in 19th-Century Anthropology”; and Patricia J. Saunders, assistant professor of English, Bowdoin College, on “Those Who Insist on Be(Come)Ing: Anthropology and the Task of Translating Identity for Caribbean Subjects.

The 3:15 p.m. keynote address and roundtable discussion will be followed by a 90-minute reception at the Benjamin Mays Center. For more information, call 207-786-6472 or 207-725-3670.

The conference is sponsored by the Women and Scientific Literacy Project; the political science department, the environmental studies program and the Office of the President at Bates College; The Hewlett Group; and the English department at Bowdoin College.

This ambitious state-funded program enhances library services throughout Maine. It is open to any Maine library that wishes to participate. Patrons of Maine Info Net libraries will be able to search the holdings of member libraries through their local library computers. Requests to borrow materials are initiated online and books will be sent to the patron’s home library for pick-up.

URSUS, the University of Maine system, joined Maine Info Net in mid January. Beginning in March, the Portland Public Library and many other libraries will add their catalogs to the online information system. Maine Info Net was funded through a bond issue approved by Maine voters in June 1996 and will eventually combine the information resources of academic, public and school libraries and many research and medical institutions.

Maine is the first state to implement an statewide online system that includes academic, public, state and school libraries.

More than a decade ago, the Colby, Bates and Bowdoin libraries established a direct document delivery service for sharing materials, collaboratively automated their catalogs and began jointly acquiring electronic resources. More recently, through support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, they introduced shared videoconferencing, faculty and staff technology training, collaborative development of web-based instructional materials and establishment of study abroad programs in London, Quito and Cape Town.

Participation in Maine Info Net represents a commitment by the three private colleges to partner with the University of Maine and public and private libraries statewide. The focus is to enhance educational endeavors, to strengthen the state’s economy and to broadly make accessible to the citizens of Maine the historically rich library resources held by the three college libraries.