President-elect Clayton Spencer (left) talks with interim President Nancy Cable and Trustee Karl Mills '82 before the Reunion Address. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

“It’s not enough simply to circle the wagons and insist that small is better, or that nothing can replace the human factor in education,” Spencer told enthusiastic listeners on the Friday evening of Reunion, June 8.

Complete Reunion 2012 coverage

“How do we think about Bates and places like Bates in the context of this challenging world?” she asked. “How do we make a case that we’re still important, that it’s still worth it to come to Bates, that the education you got here is still worth something?”

Sharing the podium with interim President Nancy Cable at an event launching Reunion Weekend, Spencer was candid in her views about the world for which Bates is educating students, as well as the strengths and the needs the college brings to that work.

Sharing the Reunion Address podium with interim President Nancy Cable (right), President-elect Spencer was candid in her views. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Culminating in a standing ovation, the alumni welcome was warm for the leader who will take office July 1. The “standing O” was preceded by whoops of enthusiasm about points she made and appreciative laughter at Spencer’s humor.

Her address followed an opening presentation, likewise warmly received, by Cable, who has led Bates since July 2011. Bates Trustee Karl Mills ’82 introduced the presidents.

Cable looked back at a year that was anything but a placeholder between “real” presidents: a year marked by the implementation of a dance major, the opening of the renovated Hedge and Roger Williams halls, the emergence of a reinvigorated Bates Career Development Center, and an excellent run in athletics.

But if Cable offered the year in review, Spencer looked ahead to the future of Bates in an address shot through with optimism, offering two initial recommendations.

Two keys to the future

“We need to make a virtue of our particularity, our distinctive history and identity,” Spencer said. “To engage the large, complex, dizzying forces that are coming at us, we have to stand somewhere, and we have to stand somewhere firm.”

At the conclusion of the Reunion Address, alumni begin to rise for a standing ovation. Photograph by H. Lincoln Benedict '09.

That solid foundation comprises Bates’ founding values, its location and its reputation. In a world that, more than ever, demands that liberal arts colleges justify the investment that families and society make in them, these qualities — in particular, Bates’ bedrock egalitarianism — confer institutional significance and distinctiveness.

Bates, she said, practices “not a vague kind of politically correct inclusiveness, but instead the inclusiveness that says, we are here to encounter each other as humans with potential, with gifts; and the greatest opportunity that anybody can have as a human is the opportunity to realize those gifts.

“That’s in the fabric of who we are.”

She added, “We have been ahead of our time since 1855. And that puts us in a great position to look at a world that is changing very fast.”

Spencer drew especially warm applause as she cited Maine and Lewiston as advantages to Bates. “There is no place that I would rather find myself than in Maine, which embodies ruggedness and self-sufficiency, the elemental and the substantial,” she explained.

“And that includes Lewiston,” which she described as a fascinating community “that gives our students amazing opportunities to interact with the complicated world around them on a very granular level.”

Spencer said that "the fact that our rigor and our tough-mindedness are encompassed within a community that is kind and respectful is a phenomenal strength." Photograph by H. Lincoln Benedict '09.

The third factor in establishing particularity, she said, is an outstanding reputation — which Bates has. But the college must also address the fact that “our reputational capital far exceeds our financial capital.” That’s a serious problem for a college whose educational quality, “with the kind of personal attention at every level that we give, is expensive. It is not going to get fundamentally cheaper in our lifetimes.”

Still, Spencer said, “I would much rather sign up for a job at a college with a fantastic reputation, based on excellent fundamentals, but with money to raise, than a college with lots of money without great fundamentals or a great culture.”

For her second overall prescription, Spencer told the Reunion gathering that “we need to make a virtue of our scale.”

Smallness enables Bates to educate each student “in a community…that takes as its project the development of the whole person, and situates the search for knowledge in a framework of values. This is something I think Bates does incredibly well.”

Rigor, kindness, engagement

“There are many parts of this world where respect for other human beings is low, where kindness is really undervalued,” Spencer said.

“I think kindness is not to be underestimated. The fact that our rigor and our tough-mindedness are encompassed within a community that is kind and respectful is a phenomenal strength.”

Pursuing the theme of Bates progressiveness, Spencer also reminded her listeners that Bates is ahead of the game in both interdisciplinarity and in robust engagement.

Students go out into the community and the world, she said, and “they learn. They bring that back into the classroom, and they go out again with an intellectual framework taken from the classroom. It’s a virtuous cycle,” and “we are ahead of the game in recognizing that.”

“We need to be porous to the world, we need to be intentional about what we’re doing here and we need to make sure our students go out and get the broadest possible experiences they can,” Spencer concluded.

“Our graduates need to be global participants in a highly competitive world, and it’s our job to make sure that we prepare them for this reality.”

Director of Muskie Archives and Special Collection Library Kat Stefko; Bates' Muskie Oral History Project recently won the Elizabeth B. Mason Major Project Award, from the Oral History Association, for excellence in an oral history project. The Muskie project comprises some 400 interviews.

Asked to describe her job as an archivist, Katherine Stefko’s stock reply is, “I’m paid to read other people’s mail.” The joke is revealing. Director of archives and special collections at Bates, Stefko oversees the delicate work of gathering documentary materials that reveal the details — sometimes very personal — of history.

The Muskie Archives houses nationally significant holdings relating to the late Ed Muskie ’36. You’ve called him the hero of the 1968 presidential campaign, running with Hubert Humphrey.

It was the first time a presidential candidate advertised himself as having chosen a VP who could step up and be president. There was this fabulous political ad that Humphrey put out with the image and sound of an electrocardiogram and the line, “Who is your choice to be a heartbeat away from the presidency?”

We have film showing Muskie inviting a heckler to the stage. Muskie basically said to him, “I’ll give you 10 minutes to tell people your ideas, but in exchange your group has to be quiet and listen to my ideas.” He was extraordinarily genuine in wanting to understand everyone’s opinions before formulating a policy.

By extending that respect, he really gained a lot of ground with the antiwar protesters. Many political observers speculate that had the election been even a week or two later, Humphrey and Muskie would have come from behind to win.

You recently had vice-presidential scholar Joel Goldstein at the archives researching a book.

By necessity, archivists have to be generalists, so having somebody there with dedicated time to read through and make connections within the Muskie Papers has been incredible.

He has become a huge fan of Muskie, and wrote a lot of op-eds during this election year drawing parallels between the ’68 and 2008 campaigns. Goldstein has been particularly impressed by Muskie’s ability to inspire and sustain civil discourse.

You have a broad collecting mandate, between representing Muskie and other Bates people, and then officially documenting the College’s history.

We collect externally and internally — that’s important to realize. External to Bates, that’s usually me. I spend quite a bit of time working with alumni, their families, and other donors.

It’s always better if you talk to a person about their papers, because nobody can tell a story like the person who lived it. Also, giving one’s papers to an archives is not necessarily an easy thing to do — “Here’s my mail, make it publicly available.”

I talk to people about the historical importance of their materials. And I try to foster confidence so they understand that as an archivist, I’m ethically motivated to do the right thing, balancing the privacy needs of our donors with the research interest of our patrons.

What’s the on-campus process?

Internally, Pat Webber, the College archivist, works with people on campus to make sure that their records of historical value are preserved in the archives. We are authorized to collect from College offices, but there are other records being created at Bates with permanent value. So he goes to student-organization meetings in the evening to talk about the importance of their records.

The Outing Club, for instance, is celebrating its 90th anniversary in 2010, so they and their adviser, Judy Marden, have been thoughtful, with Pat’s encouragement, about their records. Last summer we received all their historic records.

How else do you interact with alums?

We get quite a few casual visits during Reunion and Homecoming Weekend. We’ve offered a historic film festival where we’ve shown old films from the collection, and those have been quite popular.

Whenever possible we try to instill in alumni that we really want material that tells the personal side, the unofficial version of Bates’ history — scrapbooks, letters home to Mom and Dad expressing what it was like to adjust to college in Lewiston. These are the types of materials that support cultural and social history, and they can make the past seem real to today’s students.

Who laid the groundwork for the collections of College records?

Harry Rowe ’12, who worked at the College for about half a century, was the unofficial College historian. Bursar Norm Ross ’22 was a diligent record keeper. And he passed the baton to Bernie Carpenter as treasurer. They did a great deal to make sure that early records survived. We’re extraordinarily lucky to have as extensive a historical record as we do.

How is technology changing what you do?

The speed of obsolescence creates monetary challenges. Where a piece of paper, even a black and white photograph, can live happily on a shelf for 500 years, an 8-inch floppy drive is already obsolete.

We’re constantly thinking about getting things into a stable format — by today’s standards — and then developing a strategy to deal with it when that format becomes obsolete.

And something I’ve been thinking about is that kids don’t keep diaries anymore — they keep blogs. How can we thoughtfully collect and preserve blogs? I don’t have an answer yet, but I know it’s something that we need to do.

Interview by Doug Hubley, photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen

Having Walked the Walk for the first time, Jo Trogler Reynolds ’58 gets ready to dive into her lobster dinner as Nancy Tyler Harris ’59, whose husband is Kenneth ’58, looks on. [More...]

Noah Davis '05. Photograph by Ryan Heffernan '05.

Half a block behind me, American statesman Thomas Jefferson is lost in conversation with Anna Wintour, Vogue’s editor-in-chief. In front of me, three members of a dodgeball team, clad in American Apparel’s finest red and white booty shorts, pass a rubber kickball among themselves. The fourth member of the team and I discuss the difficulties of managing our interns at work.

The occasion is Trick or Drink, the Bates Halloween tradition, but instead of visiting a few Bates residences on a chilly Lewiston night, our costumed group — representing Bates classes of 2006, 2005, 2004, and 2002 — walks past tire shops and apartment buildings on Fourth Avenue in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Davis and a friend began coaching a youth soccer team in the spring. "From my perspective, the team provides a new way to interact with the community," says Davis. Photograph by Ryan Heffernan '05.

Mustering a quorum for a Brooklyn edition of Trick or Drink wasn’t hard. About 150 alums live in the adjoining Brooklyn neighborhoods of Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, and Red Hook, just across the East River. This set of neighborhoods is about 3.5 square miles in size, or equivalent to a chunk of Lewiston bounded by Great Falls and Exit 80 on the south, and the Auburn Mall and Thorncrag Bird Sanctuary to the north. Of those 150 alums, more than 100 are BOLD alums (Bobcats of the Last Decade), with more arriving each passing month.

But more than the numbers, a familiar sense of community in our Brooklyn neighborhoods made it possible to start up a local version of a Bates tradition. And for us Batesies, this community vibe is defined in part by the huge scale of what’s around us.

Despite its 8.2 million residents, New York City can be an isolating place. On the subway ride to my office in Soho, I’m surrounded by commuters, yet we’re just individuals thrown into the worst carpool ever, with nothing to do except listen to our iPods, read Esquire, and avoid eye contact. It’s the antithesis of how we navigated the Bates quad.

But after work, when I get off the F train at Carroll Street and climb one flight of stairs onto Smith Street, though I’m four blocks from my apartment I know I’m home. The street is filled with mom-and-pop shops, small restaurants, and three-story buildings. There’s the bodega where the owners know my name. The bartenders at Brooklyn Social where I occasionally play pool don’t, but I don’t need Cheers. What I need, and what I get, is better: an almost imperceptible nod of recognition when I enter. That’s enough.

Looking back, I was drawn to this section of Brooklyn for many of the same reasons I chose Bates. More than 100,000 people live in these neighborhoods, but there’s an undeniable sense of community. Like Bates and Lewiston, it feels real, not quaint. “Very neighborhoody,” says John Scott Johnson ’04, a former Park Slope resident.

Current and longtime Park Slope resident Doug Olney ’81 has exited the young-alum ranks but easily makes the Bates-Brooklyn connection. When he looks around he sees, quite literally, Bates. “My neighborhood was developed around the same time as Bates, the late 1800s and early 1900s, so the style is similar to buildings like Coram and Hedge,” he says. “Despite renovation and renewal in the area, the essential features remain recognizable, like when you return to Bates for Reunion.”

Noah Davis '05, who says his Park Slope neighborhood meets the "need to connect," pauses on Smith Street near his apartment. Photograph by Ryan Heffernan.

Craig Teicher ’01, a published poet and editor at Publishers Weekly, decamped to Brooklyn four years ago after living in a “very expensive closet” in Manhattan for two years during graduate school at Columbia. He moved into a two-bedroom apartment on Court Street that costs about as much as his “closet,” and now lives there with his wife and 10-month old child. “I love the on-the-fly social aspect of the neighborhood,” says Teicher, who keeps remembering Bates friends that live close by during our phone conversation.

Though cheap rents initially drew many of us here, we’ve found a place that meets more than a financial need — a need to connect. “Bates taught us how to create a sense of community and then take that wherever we go,” says Sara Kravitz ’04, who lives in Cobble Hill, a historically Italian neighborhood known for its family-run shops.

This spring, a friend from high school and I started coaching an under-12 soccer team. Another friend, Chet Clem ’05, the stalwart goalie of my Bates intramural soccer teams, occasionally helps. At first, our players’ parents couldn’t understand why we were volunteering: “You guys don’t, um, have kids, right?” But our enthusiasm won them over. From my perspective, the team provides a new way to interact with the community. Doug Olney, a Park Slope resident since 1983, knows how it works — Brooklyn’s many, many communities” creates alluring possibilities for civic involveme’nt. “It really pulls you in and stays with you.”

There are, of course, grumblings about the area’s gentrification. The average Park Slope rent has almost tripled since 2005, and American Apparel and Urban Outfitters are slowly replacing tiny boutiques. Soon the Bates crew might be priced out, but the BBQs will continue at apartments in another part of Brooklyn. Bobcats know how to find each other.

By Noah Davis ’05

A rhetoric major, Noah Davis ’05 is an associate editor at mediabistro.com in New York and a staff writer at Goal.com. As a freelancer, he published features in The Onion‘s AV Club, Penthouse, and Time Out New York.