By H. Jay Burns, editor

This issue reflects the College’s ongoing Bates Contemplates Food initiative in myriad ways, including eight profiles of alumni who produce food in Maine.

Here on campus, a recent BCF event was food writer Michael Pollan’s lecture in the Chapel. A few hours before speaking to that overflow crowd, Pollan talked informally in Chase Lounge about his writing focus.

In the late 1980s, he got interested in the “messy places where humans and nature can’t be kept from each other.” Food was one of the messiest places, he found, because humans can never retreat from this engagement with nature. “You can’t be Thoreau in your vegetable garden,” he told the students. If you try, you won’t take steps to protect your food — “you won’t firebomb a woodchuck,” he said, alluding to his famous attempt to drive the rodents from his Connecticut garden, as chronicled in his 1988 essay “Gardening Means War.”

In Walden, Thoreau throws in the trowel on his large-scale bean field after one season because he doesn’t believe it’s right to tell nature how to behave. Pollan calls Thoreau “defeatist” for his backpedaling attitude toward food production. “We are in nature,” he told the students. “We’ve been implicated in nature for a lot longer than you think.”

His references to Thoreau, woodchucks, and firebombing sure got my attention. In high school, I used a .30-30 rifle to kill a woodchuck nibbling on broccoli in our vegetable garden — a great shot, really, as the rodent was more than 100 feet away. The woodchuck’s death brought no reprimand from my father, both a Thoreau disciple and avid gardener.

Like Pollan, he had long since revised Thoreau’s operations manual while retaining its essence. For example, Thoreau burned tree stumps for heat. We would drive from our Waterford, Maine, home to the nearby Paris Manufacturing wood factory. Out back, workers dumped kiln-dried blocks of hardwood, which we hauled back to Waterford in our Chevy truck.

Gwen Lexow, who teaches the first-year seminar “Into the Woods: Rewriting Walden,” understands very well that we all make certain accommodations as we live our lives. Her students, however, haven’t figured that out yet. They tend to condemn Thoreau for not staying on the straight and narrow when he chooses his less-traveled path. “They call Thoreau a hypocrite,” she says. “It bothers them immensely when they find out that he lunches with his mother and that he goes back to the village.”

Lexow helps her students move past that monolithic stopping point. “Their a-ha! moment comes later,” she says, as they read Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek or Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. “They realize that even within a simple life, nothing is simple.”

The seminar, she says, “mirrors the students’ first semester. They arrive thinking it’s their chance to ‘get out from under the man’ intellectually. But it’s not so easy.”

At Walden, Thoreau does kill a woodchuck that has “ravaged” his beans, and then eats the meat. I tossed my dead woodchuck into the woods.

H. Jay Burns, Editor

As Bates College prepares to begin its first academic year with a new set of core educational requirements, a foundation in Falmouth has awarded the college more than $250,000 to support the requirements’ focus on writing skills.

The grant was received from the Davis Educational Foundation established by Stanton and Elisabeth Davis after Mr. Davis’s retirement as chairman of Shaw’s Supermarkets, Inc.

The foundation gave a three-year, $255,000 grant to help implement programs designed to strengthen writing instruction at Bates. The funds will support faculty development and a new peer tutoring program, as well as formal assessments of Bates’ new approaches to writing instruction.

Accepted by a faculty vote in 2006 and taking effect this fall for the classes of 2011 and after, the new general education requirements represent a significant shift in Bates’ curriculum and teaching methods. For many years, most Bates students have taken a first-year seminar with a writing focus and have written a senior thesis, a major undertaking that brings to fruition much of what they have learned at the college. The new writing program will develop students’ writing abilities through the interim.

“What the Davis Foundation did was help us build a bridge across the river” in implementing the writing-related requirements, says Margaret Imber, a faculty member and member of a team exploring ways to support students and faculty during the transition to the new requirements.

“We were going there in any case,” says Imber, referring to the new approach to writing, “but here was somebody who had the capacity to say, ‘Let us help you get there faster.’”

The peer writing-tutor program, in which experienced Bates students will help fellow students write more effectively, debuts this fall with two components.

One involves the first-year seminars taken by 95 percent of Bates students. These seminars, well-established in the curriculum, are designed to give new students the fundamentals of college-level reasoning, writing and research. The peer tutoring program will attach 15 tutors to certain first-year seminars to serve as a resource for the class.

The other piece of the program is the creation of a pool of 15 writing assistants in the college library five evenings a week — for many students, prime time for doing academic work. “Students will have writing assistants available to them when they’re actually writing their papers,” says Imber, whose team observed similar writing-support programs at other colleges such as Wellesley and Middlebury.

“The numbers show that students are responsive to these programs. And if that’s where they are, that’s where we need to be.”

Davis funds will also support workshops where faculty will explore new techniques for teaching writing at different levels. In addition, the grant will provide opportunities to examine what works best in the peer-tutor program and to assess the writing curriculum as a whole.

Bates’ new “gen ed” requirements emphasize interdisciplinary study, scientific reasoning, laboratory experience and quantitative literacy in addition to writing.