The Plan extends a vision that respects valued campus qualities and provides future guidance to enhance the unique living/learning environment of the College. Phase I of the original Facilities Master Plan has been largely completed.

The College will update the Facilities Master Plan through a process that began in March and will be completed in January, 2010. The update will:

• Revisit the original Plan and review key assumptions
• Consider changes to reflect emerging needs or changing circumstances
• Provide more detailed studies of the choices ahead
• Confirm or revise the future phasing of improvements
• Establish the framework for improvements for the next five to seven years

The Update will be guided by the College’s Master Planning Steering Committee,composed of members of the administration, faculty and trustees. The planning process has been organized to be informative and inclusive, providing many opportunities  for discussion.

The entire Bates community is invited to a Campus Forum 3-5 p.m. Wednesday, May 13 in Rooms 221-222 new Commons. Topics will include:

• Master Plan Update: Goals and Process
• Discussion of Key Issues
• Your Ideas: Opportunities for the Future

There also will be “open houses,” noon-1:30 p.m. May 13 and 3-5 p.m. May 20 in Rooms 221 new Commons

These sessions will provide an opportunity to:

• Meet the planning team
• Provide input on key issues
• Discuss your ideas

Three times a year, I receive a packet from the editor of this magazine, a packet that no one else receives. In it are the stories of 50 or 60 people, all part of the Bates community in some way: alumni, faculty, staff. But they are united by more than being part of this community. They have all recently died.

It is my job to read through this packet and write obituaries for this magazine. I read through the factual material that the College records: academic majors and athletic awards, postgraduate degrees and marriages or divorces, places of employment and number of children. I read the newspaper articles and Class Notes and other bits of information the College has collected over the years. I search the Internet for any additional material I can find.

And then I try to read between the lines, try to figure out who this person was, what Bates meant to them, and what they meant to Bates. It is my job to capture all of that in just a few paragraphs.

I picture them hurrying across the Quad to class, watching the Hathorn clock tick off another minute. I see them climbing the stairs in Parker or Roger Bill or Rand. I know that each of them sat beneath the elms at least once during their years at Bates, and walked down College Street in search of off-campus sustenance. I wonder if any of them lived in the same rooms I did in Page or Mitchell or Rand.

It always surprises me to read about the different lives people with a degree from Bates lead. A math major works on the Manhattan Project. A French major ends up doing disaster relief for the Red Cross. The big jock is moved to write poetry. We walked the same path to shake hands with the College president and receive our degree, but after that our common path led us in thousands of directions.

Some of us lead lives of quiet contentment on a farm in rural Maine only a few miles from where we were born. Others thrive on the pulse of Wall Street. A teacher who never married amasses a small fortune, which he wills to Bates for scholarships. Another amasses a small army of children and devotes her life to volunteering at their schools.

Usually, there are people whom I wish I had known, people who shared my interests or who did something so interesting that it sparks my curiosity. I have to remind myself that I have lost the opportunity to learn from him or her, or to share our interests. I wonder if our paths ever crossed.

It is my job to set aside my ruminations and concentrate on summarizing a life in a way that is meaningful to the Bates community and to the deceased’s family.

The hardest obituaries to write are those of people I knew, people with whom I sat under the elms or climbed the stairs, or walked down College Street. I’ve learned to write those first, before I am paralyzed by their deaths.

Almost as hard to write are those about people for whom I have little or no information. Sometimes I gather my courage and call one of the deceased’s survivors. I hastily assure him or her that I’m not asking for money, that instead I am asking for some details about the person they loved. The call then turns into one of joy and relief, an opportunity for the bereaved to talk again about someone they have lost.

Only once have I been rebuffed, by a man’s mother. I knew the deceased had been a gardener and a cook, and that he was predeceased by his dear friend, a man. There was a hint of a hidden life there, but his mother refused to acknowledge it. And that is all that I have: only the barest details. I stare at the two or three lines I have managed to extract from those details, and only reluctantly move on.

But I have found that usually it doesn’t matter how much material I have about a person. It is the details in the material that matter. A pile of newspaper clippings gives me a fact or two, but a note scribbled in the deceased’s hand — “Now that the kids are grown, I have finally learned to sail” — tells me so much about the person.

Another packet just arrived. I sigh in relief that there is no one I know. But soon I will come to understand a bit about all of the people whose lives I will summarize, and I will find a few I wish I had known.

It is my job to write these obituaries. And it is my privilege.

By Christine Terp Madsen ’73, illustration by Marty Braun

Chris Madsen ’73 is a writer who lives in Olympia, Wash., but dreams of Maine.

Now, as community relations director at the software company Blackbaud Inc., Ehrenfried is able to foster her love of public service through Blackbaud’s philanthropic efforts.

One of the company’s core beliefs is that service to others makes the world a better place, and Ehrenfried helps the company and its employees live out that value. “I’m really having a whole lot of fun,” she said. “I’m able to maintain my public service roots while working in a corporate environment.” [More...]

Gomes, known as the “Conscience of Harvard,” is a graduate of Bates College and Harvard Divinity School. He holds honorary degrees from 36 colleges and universities. [More...]

Lee Abrahamsen

Several years ago, students in Lee Abrahamsen’s 300-level virology course undertook a project for a hepatitis-C support group at a local hospital.

Members of the group craved information about everyday impacts the disease would have — “things like, ‘Can I share my towels with my family without infecting them?’ ” Abrahamsen explains. “The students developed this nice little booklet for them. It was a really neat project.”

That’s the kind of community orientation that won Abrahamsen, associate professor of biology, a prestigious award from the Maine Campus Compact. In April 2007, Abrahamsen was one of three Maine college educators to receive the consortium’s Donald Harward Faculty Award for Service-Learning Excellence (named for Bates President Emeritus Harward). [More...]

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

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

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