President for a Day, a tradition started three years ago by President Elaine Tuttle Hansen, reinforces the Bates goal of learning to see other perspectives.

This year, President Hansen traded places with Walter Garcia ’11 of Stonington, Maine.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Bates College President Elaine Tuttle Hansen has been honored as an outstanding alumna educator by the Mount Holyoke College Alumnae Association.

Hansen, a 1969 graduate of Mount Holyoke, has been Bates president since 2002.

In receiving the alumnae association’s Elizabeth Topham Kennan Award during the college’s alumnae reunion in May, Hansen was praised for her “respect for teaching and working with students” and her “administrative prowess and deep love of the liberal arts.”

Those talents and attitudes, noted the award citation, “combine to make you a strong president.”

The award citation said that Hansen’s “colleagues have called you ‘an exceptionally capable leader and administrator’ and laud your ‘combination of intellectual leadership, vision for the college, and managerial acumen.’ Yet they also note your open and enthusiastic style, which has helped you forge strong working relationships with trustees, faculty, staff, and students.”

Hansen was lauded for leading Bates through a successful fundraising campaign, supervising development of a Campus Facilities Master Plan, initiating major construction projects and overseeing the implementation of Bates’ new General Education curriculum and new interdisciplinary initiatives.

Completed in 2006, The Campaign for Bates: Endowing Our Values raised $121 million for endowed scholarships, faculty support and academic quality, as well as for annual giving, campus revitalization and new facilities. In 2008, Bates opened a new dining Commons, new residence hall, and Alumni Walk, a major new cross-campus walkway.

Mount Holyoke’s Elizabeth Topham Kennan Award, presented periodically to an outstanding alumna educator, honors the service that Mount Holyoke President Emerita Elizabeth Topham Kennan gave to her college and to higher education. Joining Hansen as 2009 honorees were Anne Conger McCants, a member of the Mount Holyoke Class of 1984, and Nancy Ahlberg Mellor, a member of the Class of 1959.

The Kennan Award has been given only three other times since its 1995 establishment. Prior recipients are Elizabeth Topham Kennan ’60 (1995), Elizabeth Wilson Poe ’72 (2000) and Nancy R. Disenhaus ’72 (2002).

“I’m so honored, and once again incredibly grateful to Mount Holyoke,” Hansen said of the award. “Anything I have accomplished speaks largely to the transformative power of my liberal arts education at the nation’s first and still best college for women.”

The full citation will be available online in July 2009.

To the Bates community,

As most of you know, the Bates Board of Trustees gathered on campus this past weekend for our regular October meeting.  One of the important topics of discussion was the current state of the global economy and the impact on Bates College and its students, faculty, and staff members.

We are all grateful that Bates has not yet experienced any of the immediate disruptions that some of our peers have felt.  But we know that we are not immune to declining markets, higher costs of borrowing, the potential impact on giving, and the economic effects on our students and employees and their families.

While so much remains unknown about the extent and duration of the situation today, I want to let you know how the Trustees and the administration of the College are working to monitor and respond as appropriate to the various challenges we may confront.

Endowment spending

In this year’s budget of $87.7 million, $12.5 million in revenue came from the investment earnings of our endowment. The amount we spend annually from the endowment is a percentage of its total value (which varies with market fluctuations). To smooth out the effect of market variations, we calculate our spending based on a 13-quarter average value.   This means that the effect of the recent downturn for all investment categories will have only moderate implications for this year’s budget, but may have more significant and lasting consequences going forward.  We will be taking this factor into account in our budgeting for next year and in our multi-year financial plan, which is revised annually at about this time.

Our endowment is managed by an active trustee Investment Committee composed of financial and investment experts whose strategies have ensured excellent earnings in recent years.  In the current situation, as always, the Committee has been working closely with the Treasurer’s office and with our financial consultants, meeting frequently and taking careful steps to balance competing objectives: protecting our current revenues and protecting the value of the endowment for future generations.

Budgeting and multi-year financial planning

We continue to gather information in this volatile period so that we can identify all the possible ways in which the economic situation will affect our budget planning through two processes that have already begun: building the budget for next year and updating our 10-year financial modeling.  Areas to monitor include the financial resources of our students and their families, which can certainly have an impact on our financial aid budget and planning.  We consider this issue a top priority and will make every effort to preserve our ability to meet the demonstrated need of all admitted students.  Gifts and grants to the College, another important source of revenue, may be reduced in both number and amount.  We will monitor the gift and grant opportunities, but we will also redouble our efforts to ask everyone who can to help us. We will be particularly interested in support of the Bates Fund, which provides the annual, spendable gifts that currently support roughly 5 percent of our operating budget.

We can use the time we have now to examine all aspects of the organization and to consider where services, programs, and structures could be modified, if necessary, to maximize efficiency, so that we can focus on our most important priorities.

The timing of our multiple on-campus planning processes should serve us well.  In the coming weeks, as we continue our routine financial planning with the goal of preparing updates for the Board in January, more information about many factors will become available.  Our special planning efforts—through the campus-wide process launched last year and through the campus facilities master planning work ongoing since 2003—are also very important both as ways of widely discussing our priorities and as sources of exciting ideas for robust fund-raising efforts in the near future.

Communications

We will continue to communicate with the campus when we have new information and periodically during the planning processes, with a goal of promoting as much transparency and inclusiveness as possible.  Faculty, staff and students who serve on the Budget and Finance Advisory Committee will be involved, as usual, in discussions about the budget for fiscal year 2010 as well as the 10-year financial plan, and I will urge the Committee and its members to seek additional ways of reporting to and hearing from the campus community.

Priorities and principles

As I have said in previous messages, a few high-level principles, consistent with our practice and policy to date, will continue to inform us during this time of heightened financial concern for both the College and its constituents:

• Providing our students with the best educational experience is our most important priority, and we are committed to using our resources wisely and strategically to sustain our leadership and reputation for academic excellence.
• To this end, and in accord with our founding mission of expanding educational opportunities, we seek to attract and retain the most talented students regardless of financial need, and we believe that all students learn best in a richly diverse and inclusive community. Access and affordability, therefore, continue to be vital College priorities.
• We have good management strategies and policies in place.  Bates has a proud history of prudent financial stewardship, overseen by the dedicated Trustees who have exercised their fiduciary responsibilities through many financial downturns and our highly professional administrative staff. We have always worked hard to use resources wisely and avoid extravagance or risk.  The current environment for higher education is extremely complicated and rapidly changing, so we will not make any policy changes without our characteristic concern for due deliberation, careful analysis, and informed consideration of options and consequences.
  I recognize that these are times of stress and concern for all, but I want you to know that the Trustees and I have every confidence in the strength and perseverance of this institution and the entire Bates community.

Regards,
Elaine

Bates College announced the public phase of the most ambitious fund-raising effort in its history Oct. 9 – a $120 million campaign focused on endowment for greater student financial aid, academic programs and facilities improvements.

About 500 students, parents, faculty and staff members gathered by Lake Andrews on the Bates campus for the official campus launching of the campaign, called: The Campaign for Bates: Endowing Our Values.
The fund-raising effort includes endowment, annual giving and capital improvements, and focuses on five objectives:

• Increased endowment for financial aid ($45 million)
• Increased endowment for academic programs and more equitable faculty compensation to keep Bates competitive with its college peers ($20 million)
• Increased unrestricted endowment to provide steady annual revenue for all college operations ($10 million)
• Increased annual giving for the college operating budget through the Bates Fund ($25 million)
• Increasing funding to support improved campus facilities ($20 million)

The campaign will end in 2006 – at the conclusion of the 150th anniversary celebration of the College’s founding in 1855 – and the college is already more than 60 percent toward its goal. Through Oct. 1, leadership gifts, including commitments from all 40 members of the College’s Board of Trustees, each of its senior administrators, and from a select group of alumni, parents and friends, have pushed the total to $73.5 million.  Included in the current tally are 15 gifts and pledges of $1 million or more.

The endowment-focused effort reflects the steps Bates is taking to bring its level of financial resources in line with its national reputation for excellence.
In her address at the launch ceremony, Bates President Elaine Tuttle Hansen said that the college’s “culture of academic rigor, independence, open exchange, and service must be matched with an equal culture of philanthropy.”

Hansen noted a growing gap “between the super-rich colleges and the more moderately endowed, like Bates. Bates came later than most of the other colleges that we compete with to the realization that frugality was not enough, that fund-raising was critical; along with our New England values went pride in our independence, self-reliance, and polite reluctance to talk about money. But pride of another sort—pride in our extraordinary level of accomplishment—now motivates us to mount a campaign for the support that an institution of this caliber requires and deserves.”

At a tent filled with tables next to Lake Andrews, guests were asked to write on cards their hopes for Bates’ future. Those cards were placed in a racing shell, and from a dock on Lake Andrews the Bates rowing team symbolically launched the campaign with these aspirations in the shell, rowing across the lake.

The master of ceremonies at the launching was College Trustee Michael Bonney of Sudbury, Mass., president and CEO of Cubist Pharmaceuticals and a 1980 Bates graduate.

“Bates is powerful and necessary today,” Bonney said. Bonney told the audience of his own wish for Bates’ future: “As a member of the Board of Trustees, I have learned that the only way to ensure our continued strength is to raise much more money for the college than we’ve ever raised before.  A former parent told Elaine two years ago: ‘Bates has everything—great faculty, wonderful students, the perfect environment for learning, attention to the individual, a set of values that make everyone who touches the college better.  It has everything except money.’

“This is true, and we are now at a very important point in Bates’ history,” he said. “In order to continue achieving at the level we all expect, we must raise significant funds.  We’re all going to need to stretch.  We provide the same quality education as our NESCAC peers, yet our yearly operating budgets are much smaller.

“While we can applaud the College for doing ‘so much with so little,’” Bonney said, “we all know that this is not good for the long term, because it cannot be sustained.”

Bonney noted that the Bates community includes more than 170 faculty members, 500 staff, 1,700 students, 20,000 alumni and 4,000 parents of students. The campaign announcement was made as part of this year’s Parents and Family Weekend on the campus.

Bates has had three fund-raising campaigns in its recent history, raising $59.3 million in a campaign that ended in 1996; $21 million in a campaign that ended in 1984; and $6.8 million in a campaign that ended in 1974.