The ceremony beginning Bates’ 144th academic year on Sept. 9 took place on a choice afternoon, sunny and mild, and explored in depth the concept of choice — no small issue for 470 first-year students confronted with new freedom to make their own choices. (Students new to Bates also included one transfer, for a total of 471.)

“This is just the beginning of a long lifetime of making choices,” college President Elaine Tuttle Hansen said. Quoting Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling, she said, “It is our choices that show who we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

She pointed out to the new students that a traditional residential undergraduate college like Bates is an accommodating arena for learning to make good choices — affording “the time, the space and the resources to explore lots of options,” as well as some buffering against the consequences of bad decisions.

If our choices show who we truly are, Hansen suggested, the new students might aspire to become “liberated consumers.” In contrast to the rampant infantilized consumption described by political theorist Benjamin Barber in the book Consumed, Hansen depicted the liberated consumer as one “who does not think he is free of the necessity of consuming — she is maybe even someone who likes to shop — but does not succumb to the pressure to consume mindlessly.”

She continued, “As individuals, it’s necessary and quite seductive to be focused on our personal consumption and our private choices. But as a society we know we must somehow make better collective, public, social choices about what and how we consume.”

“Somehow,” but how? Hansen offered guidelines that would serve anyone well as rules for living: valuing complexity, participation, commitment, real human relationships and deep focus on the challenges at hand.

Hansen’s theme harmonized with the college’s efforts, intensified this decade, to come closer to environmental sustainability, exemplified by this summer’s charge to the new students to advocate for curtailing climate change. But Hansen ultimately steered back to an idea that could be as relevant to residential life as to global responsibility.

She brought up the famous psychology test called the Marshmallow Experiment, in which young children are given the choice of having one sweet treat right away or having two if they can wait a while for it.

Referencing an article about the experiment in the May 18 New Yorker, Hansen explained that kids who can wait tend to be more successful as adults than the immediate gratifiers. The same self-control that enables them to wait for the treat, it turns out, translates into myriad practices and habits that cultivate adult success.

Noting that disciplined decision-making is as important to institutions as to individuals, Hansen segued to the topic in store for the featured convocation speakers: brief updates on the latest phase of the collaborative Bates planning process that began two years ago.

Each speaker was involved with a team developing recommendations for the college in a particular area. Leslie Hill, associate professor of politics and special assistant to the president for diversity initiatives, spoke first. Her team developed recommendations for the college on the theme of Learning at Bates.

Reminding listeners that “learning is what Bates is all about,” Hill wove together imperatives to deepen Bates’ intellectual community; use its tangible and intellectual resources wisely; and embrace diversity as something that needs to be enhanced at Bates and something that will enhance Bates.

Bates’ commitment to excellence drives its commitment to diversity, Hill explained. Bates can’t attain excellence without embracing the disparate qualities and contributions of all who come here to teach and to learn. “As importantly,” Hill said, “preparing all students for leadership and service in a multicultural, rapidly changing, and highly competitive world is our job.”

Matthew Côté, associate professor of chemistry and associate dean of the faculty, summarized the findings of the Natural Sciences and Mathematics in the Liberal Arts team. Of the team’s 11 recommendations, he highlighted two: the prioritization of a new facility where math and the sciences could be taught under one roof, and the redoubling of efforts to secure funding for student-faculty research.

Côté also mentioned four pedagogical projects now under way as a result of the team’s work: an integrated math and science course sequence, an effort to broaden computing experience and resources throughout those disciplines, a grant-funded process (undertaken jointly with Bowdoin College) to explore the teaching of quantitative reasoning and a project to improve communication within the science and math division.

Kirk D. Read, associate professor of French, co-chaired the team investigating The Arts in the College and the Community. Read’s humorous and expansive talk used his own experiences in theater as an undergraduate to illustrate the value of the visual and performing arts in the liberal arts context.

The late-afternoon ceremony also included addresses by Dean of the Faculty Jill Reich; Daniel Gimbel ’10, president of the college’s student government; and William Blaine-Wallace, multifaith chaplain.

Matthew Côté, associate professor of chemistry; Atsuko Hirai, Kazushige Hirasawa Professor of History; and John Rhodes, associate professor of mathematics, have been awarded Phillips Faculty Fellowships for the 2002-03 academic year, announced Donald W. Harward, president of Bates College.

Phillips Faculty Fellowships at Bates provide a full-year’s paid leave, with additional funding for scholarly research, enabling fellows to travel, pursue scholarship and interact with other leading scholars in their field.

Côté will spend one year fabricating and studying arrays of metal oxide nanostructures at the Laboratory for Surface Science and Technology at the University of Maine at Orono. Access to the laboratory and to its staff expertise will expand the range of research possibilities for Côté and his students, and will produce continuing collaborations after Côté’s return to Bates.

Hirai plans to complete her manuscript, Government by Mourning: Death and Political Integration in Japan, 1612-1912 and secure its acceptance for publication. Her research is a study of governmental edicts on mourning and related rites in Japan. The grant enables her to complete extensive archival work in Tokyo as well as in provinces of Japan, and to meet with scholars in Japan and the United States who are working on related topics.

Rhodes will focus in two areas: number theory and mathematical biology. His plans include investigating the number theory of modular forms for complex quadratic number fields. The grant also will enable Rhodes to develop a new research direction in phylogenetic invariants, studying algebraic methods of inferring relationships among species from DNA sequence data.

The Phillips Faculty Fellowships are part of an ambitious initiative of awards, honors and opportunities for faculty and students funded by a $9-million endowment bequest from former Bates President Charles F. Phillips and his wife, Evelyn Minard Phillips, in 1999. President and Mrs. Phillips, longtime Auburn residents, served Bates from 1944 through 1966. Charles died in March 1999, just months after the death of Evelyn, his wife of 65 years. In addition to the faculty fellowships, the Phillips Endowment Program supports student fellowships, two endowed faculty professorships and academic programs recommended by the dean of the faculty.

Political Scientist Mark A. Kessler has been promoted to the rank of full professor. A member of the Bates faculty since 1983, Kessler co-authored The Play of Power: An Introduction to American Government (St. Martin’s Press: 1996), a textbook concerned with the integration of women and minorities into the U.S. government and political system. Kessler, who also wrote Legal Services for the Poor (Greenwood: 1987), received dual honors from the Northeast American Political Science Association for his paper, “Legal Mobilization for Social Reform: Power and the Politics of Agenda Setting.” It was judged the best paper presented at the organization’s 1991 meeting and best paper evaluated in the American government section panels.

Kessler, who specializes in American politics, received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh, and master’s and doctoral degrees from the Pennsylvania State University.

Aviva Chomsky, history, is the author of West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870-1940 (Louisiana State University Press, 1995). She received a Johns Hopkins University Cuban Studies Travel Grant in 1994 and spent four months in Cuba researching migrant workers in the sugar industry at the turn of the century. She teaches an on-site, month-long course on the origins of the Cuban revolution and is the author of Cuba: What the New York Times Won’t Tell You, published in The Dissident in 1995. Chomsky, who earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, joined the Bates faculty in 1990.

Matthew J. Côté, chemistry, has been published in a number of professional journals. In 1992, he was awarded a $29,500 grant from The Research Corp. for a project titled, “Scanning tunnelling optical microscopy of transparent platinum cluster films.” His visiting postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, involved using electrochemical scanning tunneling microscopy to study redox reactions of silver electrodes with atomic resolution. He received a bachelor’s degree from Syracuse University and a doctoral degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Côté began teaching at Bates in 1991.

Hong Lin, physics, has researched nonlinear dynamics due to interaction among transverse modes of a laser and eliminating distortion in image transmission via four-wave mixing and phase conjugation. Her research has been published in “Optics Communications,” “Acta Optica Sinica,” and “Acta Physica Sinica.” She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Beijing Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in China and a doctoral degree from Bryn Mawr College. Lin joined the Bates faculty in 1991.

Shuhui Yang, Chinese, specializes in Chinese vernacular fiction. He has written a critical essay titled “The Fear of Moral Failure: Self-Parody in Lu Xun’s Fiction” and co-translated Selected Chinese Songs (Beijing: People’s Music, 1983). He has been a professor of English at Fudan University in China, and received the school’s Best Teacher Award in 1983. He is a member of the American Association of Chinese Comparative Literature and the Association for Asian Studies. Yang received a bachelor’s degree from Fudan University and master’s and doctoral degrees from Washington University. He joined the Bates faculty in 1991.