Hundreds of people took part in crafting the new mission statement that Bates adopted in May. And Benjamin Mays ’20 was one of them.

When the statement declares that Bates has always “been dedicated to the emancipating potential of the liberal arts,” it’s a tribute to the great civil rights leader and educator. Mays wrote in his autobiography that Bates “did not ‘emancipate’ me; it did the far greater service of making it possible for me to emancipate myself.”

The mission statement was produced in conjunction with the College’s process of reaccreditation. While not every contributor owns a word in the final language, its creation was an open, overtly collaborative five-month effort that drew hundreds of suggestions and comments from the College community.

The result, in turn, will tickle the Bates-sense of nearly any member of that community.

“We were trying to get at why difference matters.”

The mission statement, for instance, affirms that Bates people “engage the transformative power of our differences.” Students on the mission statement committee put forth the concept of “transformative” early on, says committee chair Rebecca Herzig, professor of women and gender studies. Alums later confirmed the rightness of that word as a Bates descriptor.

In juxtaposing “transformative” and “differences,” Herzig continues, “we were trying to get at why difference matters. We realized that the transformative effect of the College happens most often when people bump up against people who are quite different from them.”

Ending the mission statement is a phrase that, in a sense, began the whole Bates enterprise: “Bates is a college for coming times.”

These words are adapted from founder and first president Oren Cheney’s pitch to Lewiston residents for the proposed school. He proposed establishing an institution for “coming time” — no “s.”

The mission statement committee “realized that people would think we just forgot the ‘s’” if they used Cheney’s exact text, Herzig explains. There was some concern, she adds, that the original reflected a denominational orientation.

“So we altered it slightly to evoke Cheney — but to also look more explicitly to the plurality of possible futures that lie ahead.” — DLH

On a given February night in 1939, an entertainment-seeking Lewiston resident could sit at home and listen to Death Valley Days on the radio. Or he could take in a movie, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, starring Mickey Rooney and Walter Connolly, at the Empire.

And if their appeal was nil? Well, how about the science show at Bates?

True: A big public event in Lewiston during February 1939 was likely the Biennial Science Exhibition. That year’s edition attracted more than 2,500 visitors, including many residents and high school students, during its two-day run, Feb. 23–24.

This photograph from the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library shows future pharmacist Ed Scolnik ’39 in Hedge Hall, then the home of the chemistry department, performing chemical mischief during a skit called “A Night of Alchemy” (hence the alchemic symbols on the sheet behind him). Bates still offers a public exhibition of student wizardry in the form of the annual Mount David Summit, a showcase for students who have both mastered their sometimes-obscure areas of study and can explain their work, too. But at least when begun in 1918, the goal of the Science Exhibition was mostly to “show…the facilities available at Bates for scientific work,” in the words of a Bates Student story.

Indeed, the Student’s long story mentions a slew of exhibits — a live albino Flemish rabbit, partially dissected cats, and an X-ray demonstration — but names not one student, despite the event’s sponsorship by the student scientific organizations.

The 1939 and subsequent exhibitions became more student- and technology-centered. Some 65 students made presentations in ’39, more than a few of which reflected an intensifying belief that technology could explain the human condition. For example, attendees could learn their blood pressure — but that wasn’t all, the Student reported. “Those who came stag tested at a lower blood pressure than those of the other variety.”

“Science and technology exhibitions — the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair being a leading example — were a big deal at the time,” says Rebecca Herzig, an associate professor of women and gender studies whose expertise is in the intersection of science, society, and identity.

Our fascination with (and anxiety about) science and technology, she adds, “has only continued to deepen.” By 1951, exhibition presentations would explain the Androscoggin River’s odor, cancer mutations in mice, and synthetic fibers from the Bates Mill.

In fact, says Herzig, the word “technology” was just coming into much wider use in the early 1900s. “Historians have argued that people were reaching for ways to understand and convey the influence of the bewildering artifacts and systems around them,” she says. “They had to adopt a whole new word — sort of like ‘Googling’ today.”

Rebecca Herzig, associate professor in the women and gender studies program at Bates College, received a $57,344 National Science Foundation grant in April for work to be completed in the coming year.

Herzig, a historian of science, will use the grant to support her research into cosmetic or nonmedical applications of recent studies of the human genome.

She is writing a book exploring the social history of hair-removal practices, particularly what such practices represent in terms of relationships between science and society. The NSF-funded research will both advance Herzig’s book and open a new chapter in the chronicle of genetic “enhancements” and their growing presence in everyday life.

Researchers are seeking ways to adapt genetic manipulation techniques to the elimination of unwanted body hair. Not only would such capabilities spell major change for what Herzig describes as the “multibillion-dollar global market in hair removal goods and services”; they would also alter our perceptions of body hair, often a potent indicator of sexual, ethnic, national and socioeconomic identity.

Discussions about the Human Genome Project and its outcomes tend to focus on the potential for treating life-threatening disease, Herzig says. “But there is enormous research and business development activity around nonmedical applications of genomic science. These things don’t get much press coverage or much attention from scholars.”

If hair removal — despite its commercial value — might seem to lack the gravitas to justify an extended investigation, that judgment itself speaks to an important aspect of Herzig’s research. She scrutinizes the bedrock assumptions that people bring to their own and others’ bodies, and by extension, to their ideas about suffering, freedom and the self.

“Rather than drawing a bright line between legitimate medical uses and frivolous cosmetic uses,” she explains, “I want ask the question of how that line gets established and moved around over time.”

For example, in the early 20th century, when women sought medical treatment for excess body hair, “some doctors would describe them as vain, irrational and so on,” Herzig explains. “But the women understood themselves as really afflicted — ‘afflicted’ was the word they used — by this condition. And some of them, when they couldn’t get help from the doctors, would try to kill themselves.”

Hair removal now is anything but tragic — yet, she says, issues around hair removal can shed light on much more contentious, even life-and-death, concerns.

“The essential practice in hair removal is sorting out what is part of you and what isn’t,” she says. “It’s literally using a razor or a depilatory to mark the line between the self and the not-self. And yet because it’s so banal, almost laughable, people are very comfortable talking about that demarcation. It doesn’t seem to raise a lot of ethical or political questions.

“But then the fundamental distinctions about what’s self and what’s not self, and the establishment of practices for maintaining that line, turn out to illuminate the same questions in far more fraught areas, such as beginning-of-life or end-of-life issues. Looking at hair, then, reveals all these quiet ideas about what we really think it means to be fully human.”

She says, “I want to try to figure out how we come to decide which parts of the self are worth disposing or eradicating, and which parts are worth fighting to keep.”

Herzig holds the college’s only full-time faculty appointment in women and gender studies. She is author, most recently, of “Suffering for Science: Reason and Sacrifice in Modern America” (Rutgers University Press, 2005). Her research focuses on the historical relations between technology, gender and freedom in the United States.

Not so long ago, shyness was usually seen as a random character trait, sadness the natural reaction to misfortune and alcoholism a sign of personal weakness.

In recent decades those conditions, and many others, have been “medicalized” — associated with biological causes and redefined as medical diagnoses, not merely products of personality or fate.

Rebecca Herzig, associate professor of women and gender studies at Bates, played a key role in a novel exploration of this pervasive phenomenon, an exploration resulting in a recent series of essays in the medical journal The Lancet.

“Most people would be familiar with medicalization from television ads for a range of things that once weren’t considered causes for concern — excessive sweating, difficulty urinating or trouble finding one’s car keys,” Herzig explains. “Now these are often considered symptoms of some larger underlying biomedical disorder best handled by a professional physician, and probably by a prescription pharmaceutical.”

Herzig, whose teaching focuses on the social dimensions of scientific change, was one of two co-conveners of a 2005 gathering that scrutinized medicalization through the lenses of psychiatry, gender studies, sociology, history, philosophy and anthropology. The Lancet essays came out of this ground-breaking session.

“We sought to examine the issue from several different perspectives,” Herzig says. “How has medicalization emerged historically? How is it playing out in different cultures? How is it divided by classic social categories like race or gender or citizenship?”

What most interested Herzig and her co-convener, University of Michigan psychiatry professor Jonathan Metzl, is the utter pervasiveness of medicalization. “There’s now no longer a time where we don’t understand ourselves as medicalized, from the time we’re given childhood vaccinations until we start being treated for Alzheimer’s disease,” she says.

“So rather than just thinking ‘This is bad’ or ‘This is good,’ we wanted to start trying to understand how this came to be and how it affects what’s possible in our world.”

Herzig came to the subject through her work as a member of the advisory board of the Bringing Theory to Practice Project, an initiative of the Association of American College and Universities. The project, directed by Bates President Emeritus Donald Harward, is exploring ways that “engaged learning” — outwardly focused educational experiences such as service-learning — may benefit today’s students.

In other words, says Herzig, the project aims to “address some problems facing students in traditional college settings — increasing rates of depression, of chemical abuse or of self-injurious behavior — by reconnecting them to a larger sense of civic engagement.”

Metzl, too, is on the advisory board. Herzig says, “We’ve seen a nationwide trend of confronting broad issues of student disengagement with individual medical diagnoses and therapies. That interested us in exploring where medicalization came from, and how deeply it has permeated our understandings of students and the college experience.”

Besides Herzig and Metzl, the scholars involved in the 2005 medicalization gathering and the Lancet articles are Nancy Tomes, of the history department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook; Nikolas Rose of the London School of Economics; Troy Duster of New York University; and Cindy Patton of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

Links to the Lancet articles appear on the AACU Web site.

Bates College faculty members William Ambrose, of Poland, and Rebecca Herzig, of Lewiston, have been named this year’s recipients of the Ruth M. and Robert H. Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Bates students and recent alumni nominate Kroepsch Award recipients on the basis of their outstanding performance as teachers.

Ambrose is an associate professor of biology. Herzig is associate professor in the women and gender studies program.

Ambrose’s research interests include issues affecting food supplies for organisms living on the Arctic Ocean floor and, of particular interest to Maine residents, the environmental impacts of commercial harvesting of marine worms such as bloodworms.

“The wonderful thing about Dr. Ambrose is, he facilitates our problem-solving,” wrote one of his nominators. “He allows us to find our own answers and I believe this is where some of the most important learning takes place.”

Ambrose has an A.B. degree from Princeton and a doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He started at Bates in 1994.

Herzig holds the only full-time faculty appointment in the Program in Women and Gender Studies at Bates. She teaches a range of interdisciplinary courses on science, technology and medicine, as well as core courses in the WGS program.

She is currently completing two books: Suffering for Science: Will, Reason, and Sacrifice in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Rutgers University Press) and The Nature of Difference: Readings in the History of Science, Race, and Sex, co-edited with Evelynn Hammonds and Abigail Bass (MIT Press).

“I always left class amazed at the insightful conclusions we had reached as a group, and at the intellectual integrity of our discussions,” a former student of Herzig’s told the Kroepsch selection committee. “This kind of collective academic achievement was possible because Professor Herzig had motivated us to read, write and think at a very high level.”

Herzig earned her B.A. in American cultural and environmental studies in 1993 from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998, the year she arrived at Bates.

Kroepsch honorees are selected from the nominees by a committee of previous recipients. The annual award is funded by an endowment established in 1985 by the late Robert H. Kroepsch, a member of the Bates class of 1933.

Three members of the Bates College faculty have been awarded institutional Phillips Fellowships to support a full year’s leave at full pay for the pursuit of significant scholarship, new research or the development of new courses or pedagogical approaches.
Funded by a college endowment established through a bequest of Bates’ fourth president, the late Charles F. Phillips, and his wife, Evelyn M. Phillips, the fellowships honor excellence among faculty.

This year’s Phillips Faculty Fellows are Pamela Baker, of Auburn, professor of biology and a member of the college’s class of 1970; J. Dykstra Eusden, of South Paris, professor of geology and a member of the class of 1980; and Rebecca Herzig, of Lewiston, associate professor of women and gender studies.

Baker has been invited by the Maulana Azad Dental College, in India, to work with its faculty on incorporating student research into the basic science curriculum. Such a change will require new approaches to education, specifically a shift to a more investigative approach rather than rote memorization of facts — a shift already embraced at Bates, where inquiry-based science teaching and learning are standard practice.

Baker will also study strategies from Indian public health education that can help her integrate a health literacy perspective into her teaching at Bates. Focusing on oral diseases and HIV/AIDS, she will investigate factors influencing how public health initiatives put scientific responses to disease into practice. A key part of the project is to promote cooperation between science educators in India and the United States.

Eusden’s project involves field study and three-dimensional modeling of active faults on New Zealand’s South Island. He will evaluate the structural geology, fault motions, earthquake hazard potential and landscape development in the Marlborough Fault Zone, an active plate-tectonic setting. The study area is part of the Seaward Kaikoura and Amuri Mountain Ranges, which are currently experiencing rapid uplift.

Based at Canterbury University, Eusden will conduct field research in fall 2005. Geodynamic modeling at the University of Maine will take place the following winter, and in spring 2006 he will return to New Zealand to finish fieldwork and examine regions where modeling and field-based interpretations are at odds.

With the support of her fellowship, Herzig aims to complete a book tentatively titled The Technological Animal: Hair Removal and the Making of Modern America. The project is intended, first, to bring an empirical, historical perspective to recent theoretical debates about the nature of sexual difference, by illuminating some of the mundane practices used to maintain the appearance of sexual dimorphism.

Second, Herzig seeks to elucidate the growth of these practices as indicating larger historical trends — in fact, to use the history of hair removal as a window through which to examine America’s political transformation from the Colonial era to the present.

Phillips Fellowship leaves typically take place away from Bates, so that recipients can interact with leading scholars in their fields. The fellowship includes support for the replacement of the faculty recipient, as well as travel expenses to research venues. Two or three of the fellowships are awarded to faculty annually.

The Phillips bequest also supports Phillips Student Fellowships, which afford students the opportunity to undertake research in international and other culturally distinct settings.