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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bates President A. Clayton Spencer

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

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

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

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

See the complete schedule of Inauguration Week events.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featuring an Olympic gold medalist and the president of Harvard University, two panel discussions will explore this cycle of conception, action, effect and perception starting at 9:30 a.m. Friday, Oct. 26, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall.

• Learn more about the panelists for The Engaged Liberal Arts.
• See the complete schedule of Inauguration Week events.

Drew Gilpin Faust

Constituting a session called The Engaged Liberal Arts, the panels continue a week of events surrounding the inauguration of Bates’ eighth president, A. Clayton Spencer, scheduled for 2:30 p.m. Friday in Merrill Gymnasium. For more information, please call 207-786-6103.

With historian and Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust (right) perhaps the best-known panelist, the discussions also feature Bates faculty and alumni drawn from diverse academic and professional realms.

Among them are pharmaceuticals CEO Michael Bonney ’80; Olympic rowing gold and silver medalist Andrew Byrnes ’05; Bates professor Lillian Nayder, an authority on Charles Dickens; and Valerie Smith ’75, dean of the college at Princeton and an expert on African American culture and literature.

Andrew Byrnes ’05 (second from left) and teammates Malcolm Howard, Jeremiah Brown and Will Crothers celebrate their silver medal at the London Olympics on Aug. 1, 2012, an achievement considered to be a triumph of competition and collaboration. Photograph by Jason Ransom / Canada Olympic Committee.

The World of Ideas, the first panel, explores scholarly engagement with objective reality. What qualities distinguish the best investigators? What conditions support the discovery of ideas? What defines a good line of inquiry? And is it true that scholars “know it when they see it?”

Here are the panelists:

Valerie Smith ’75, moderator: Dean of the college, Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature, and Professor of English and African American Studies, Princeton University; author of Toni Morrison: Writing the Moral Imagination
William Carlezon ’86: Professor of psychiatry, Harvard University; director of the Behavioral Genetics Laboratory, McLean Hospital
Drew Faust: President and Lincoln Professor of History, Harvard University; author of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
Lillian Nayder: Professor and chair of English, Bates College; author of The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth

Ideas in the World, the second discussion, looks at competition and collaboration and how these phenomena play out in the panelists’ various fields. Can these sometimes antithetical concepts create synergy? What happens when they clash? Must competition always have a zero-sum outcome? And is collaboration the same as teamwork, or something else altogether?

Here are the panelists:

Darby Ray, moderator: Director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships at Bates and the Donald W. and Ann M. Harward Professor of Civic Engagement; author of Working
Michael Bonney ’80: Chief executive officer, Cubist Pharmaceuticals Inc.
Andrew Byrnes ’05: Olympic gold (2008) and silver (2012) medalist, men’s eight rowing, Canada
Francesco Duina: Professor of sociology, Bates; author of Winning: Reflections on an American Obsession

Introducing The Engaged Liberal Arts is Thomas Tracy, Phillips Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Bates. An apt scholar for the panel introductions, Tracy offers theoretical insights into a range of vexing topics in his teaching and research, including medical and environmental ethics, and the problem of evil in the context of God’s goodness and power.