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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.

Morris Dees

Weaving stories from the Bible, from the life of Martin Luther King Jr. and from his own biography, Southern Poverty Law Center co-founder Morris Dees presents a compelling, sometimes emotional address at Bates College on May 8 as the Presidential Symposium keynote speaker. From MPBN’s Speaking in Maine. (Total time: 1:07:42) [More...]

Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2008

The 2008 Martin Luther King Jr. Day observance at Bates College focused on “Modernizing King: Old Roots, New Struggle.” Each year, Bates observes King’s birthday by suspending regular classes and focusing community attention on special programming throughout the day. [More...]

The talk by theologian, teacher and author Vincent Harding, Martin Luther King and the Future of America, will be presented in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives. The public is invited to attend at no charge.

Harding’s books include his best-known work, There is a River, and his most recent, Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero. Focusing on the end of King’s life, the essays in the book reflect on how Americans might take the civil rights leader’s final years as a challenge and a resource for the nation’s future.

Harding was senior academic adviser for the acclaimed public-television series Eyes on the Prize. Currently he is professor of religion and social transformation at the Iliff School of Theology at the University of Denver.

Previously he was chair of the history and sociology department at Spelman College in Atlanta. He served from 1969 to 1974 as the first director of the Atlanta-based Institute of the Black World.

A native of New York City, he earned his master’s degree and doctorate at the University of Chicago.

The Zerby Lecture is a memorial to Rayborn L. Zerby of Lewiston, who contributed to the growth of Bates through years of service as professor of religion and dean of the faculty before retiring in 1962. He died in 1987 at the age of 95.

Each year, the program brings leading commentators on contemporary religious thought to campus. Previous Zerby lecturers have included Holocaust chronicler Elie Wiesel and the Rev. Peter Gomes, a Bates alumnus and minister of Memorial Church at Harvard University.