The Reverend Professor Peter J. Gomes '65, D.D. '96
Sesquicentennial Address
137th Reunion, June 11, 2005

The Rev. Gomes , Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in The Memorial Church, Harvard, was introduced by William C. Hiss '66, vice president for external affairs.

I thank Bill for those generally accurate remarks of greeting and introduction. The substance of it is true. We have been friends for 43 years, I think to the consternation of us both. I am delighted to call him my friend and colleague.

I am delighted to have this occasion to address the friends and the members of Bates College on what is grandiloquently called our Sesquicentennium. Now, when I entered this Reunion possession with my vaunted classmates of 1965, they provided us with pictures of ourselves, I believe from our senior Facebook. Very conveniently, they put our names on the back on the assumption that it would be helpful to know who we were. I look at this picture and I must say I find it hard to recognize the brilliant, talented, charming young man there, compared to the person you see before you now.

But it reassures me that if I believe what I've preached all of my life, our best years are ahead of us. I look forward to moving to the front of this line with the more venerable alumni. I, since 1965, looked forward to wearing a tatty golden cape on the 50th Reunion and I’ve been told they don’t do that anymore. I want to suggest to President Joyce [Mantyla] that in 10 years’ time we should reinstitute the golden cape, and if you don’t I’ll wear one of my own!

Now, you have engaged me — or I have engaged, I should say — to give an address. I was taught, at Bates College by Brooks Quimby, that an address is longer than a speech, a speech of course is longer than remarks, and anything less than remarks not worth the honorarium. But since I’m not being paid anything today to do what I’m about to do, I shall dispense with the formal address, but I shall insist that you pay some attention to what I labor on in the following few minutes.

Paying attention is a sign that you are still alive, and I hope you will demonstrate that by bearing with me as I try to do justice to what I’ve been asked to do: to speak to, for, and about, and from Bates, on the occasion of its 150th anniversary.

This I am pleased to do. But I want to say straight away that I hope we are not taking ourselves too seriously at 150 years. That is, by certain standards, a long period of time, but by certain other standards it’s only a drop in the bucket. Indeed, if our best years are ahead of us, we should spend far more time thinking about the future, as our ancestors did, than we should be thinking about our ancestors. But there is a moment in everybody’s life, personal and institutional, when a pause for reflection is in order, and this appears to be that pause.

By some accounting, Bates College was founded in 1855. I say "by some accounting," because I seem to remember in 1964 most of us were required to attend Centennial celebrations of the College. Now, everyone who knows me knows I was never particularly good at math, but somehow the period from 1864 to 2005 does not equal 150 years. I can’t figure it out — I’ve read the history, you should too.

We are now dated from 1855. To me, that is very much like dating oneself from the moment of conception, as opposed to the moment of birth, and I suppose it is possible to do that. We were done in 1855, we emerged in 1864, and by however count you want to do it, it was a great and glorious moment. I congratulate those who founded us, who had confidence in this institution. Those simple Baptists, those pious schoolteachers, those very simple people who thought that a thing called Maine State Seminary was just what Maine needed to educate bright, young, able but otherwise people not invited into the establishment or the system as it was in that day.

Bates was always peculiar. It was peculiar in that it involved women and men on equal footing. It was peculiar in that it had persons of color in its earliest classes. It was peculiar in that it was founded not be Congregationalists, or conservative Baptists, but by Freewill Baptists. And it was peculiar in that it was the first college chartered by the state of Maine. We ought not to forget that Bowdoin and Colby were chartered, of course, by the commonwealth of Massachusetts, to which the district of Maine then belonged. And so, by any stretch of logic, Bates is the oldest Maine college in the state of Maine.

I think even Professor Muller would approve of that exegesis of date and fact. So, we are a peculiar and odd place, and the conventional wisdom never obtained here. At Bates we were always tested and told to challenge the conventional wisdom, and most of us did. We were taught by unconventional people. We existed in an unconventional world. And if we are true to our Bates identity and inheritance, we continue to be very peculiar people in a very ordinary world. That is a claim that I think we should celebrate and treasure; it’s part of our uniqueness. I would be horrified if I thought Bates College's ambition was simply to be like every one of those other little mediocre colleges listed in U.S. News & World Report.

That is not an ambition that I have for my college. I want us to stand out — to be odd, to be different, to be recognizably peculiar. I think of the great epitaph of the Unitarian clergyman of the 19th century Theodore Parker. It was said of him, “From their orthodox dissent, he dissented.” I like to think of us as a group of dissenting people, who simply don’t believe everything we read, we believe even less of everything we hear, and some of us believe even less of everything we say. I think a certain degree of dissent is healthy. It is built in the blood of Bates’ peculiar foundation, and at 150 years — give or take a decade or so — we should celebrate that and claim it as our own.

So we are a peculiar place. We’re also a particular place. We’re not just anywhere, and we’re not just anyone. We are located, as we used to say in our day, “centrally isolated in Lewiston, Maine, on the banks of the odiferous Androscoggin.” The Androscoggin, I think thanks to the late Doc Lawrance is less odiferous than it once was, and Lewiston is not quite the centrally isolated berg it once was — things are different. But standing or sitting in this quadrangle, surrounded by these leafy elms in lofty realms and so forth, time could be said to stand still. There is a moment of homecoming, reunion, reconciliation, which makes of us all much younger than ever we were, even when we were here.

As I passed along the cheering throngs of the younger graduates, I remember vaguely standing in their position 40 years ago, looking at the Class of 1915. Now, if you people think you’re old, just think what it was like to look at the Class of 1915 passing through without benefit of golf carts — they hadn’t invented them then. These ancients of days were passing before us, and I think those of us in the Class of ’65 thought that no one could ever live to be that age and still walk and talk without drooling.

Jim Leamon '55, professor emeritus of history, greets Peter Gomes '65 after his Sesquicentennial address at Reunion.

But here we all are. So I looked at the young people and I said, “You know, once upon a time, we looked like you, and sooner than you think, you will look like us.” That is inevitable, unavoidable, and it is part of a glorious transformation by which we are all always young.

One of the reasons to come back is to just see how horrible your roommates look. It makes you feel so much better. You feel so much more youthful to say, “My god, when we were in college, he was that 32-inch kneeing varsity athlete who jumped over the pole vault, and now he can hardly find his chair. And I was a slob, I’m still a slob, but boy do I feel good about it!” There’s something about Reunion that is very important, and I for one confess that is why I come back — to take a certain wicked pleasure in the infirmities of others.

But this is not just any college, and we are not just any kind of person. We are very particular people and we have a particular way of looking at what an education is supposed to be about. We do not at Bates simply want to be great, though we want to be great. We also were taught that we wanted to be good as well. Being great is not all that it’s cracked up to be, without being good. We didn’t want to collect here just wisdom, though a lot of that was dispensed to us in one form or another, but we also were given a large dose of virtue — that we were meant to stand for something and to make a difference in the world. And while scholarship was, and remains, at the heart of our enterprise, our motto is translated an “ardent love of study.”

Nevertheless, scholarship in the absence of service was something that we were taught to despise. And so, it used to be said, with a certain snarl and sneer, that Bates just produced preachers and teachers. Do remember that, as the general canard usually offered by Bowdoin bankers and Colby manufacturers. As a preacher and teacher, I rejoice in that inheritance of Bates College. I think it made an enormous difference to us and to the world in which Bates preachers and teachers plied their craft out there in the world. And I think the world was, in a means, a better place for it. It saddens me that we produce fewer and fewer preachers and teachers, but I’d like to think of all the people that we do produce, that they are all continually infected with the same kind of zeal, the same kind of sense of service, the same kind of sense of energy that characterized those generations of preachers and teachers. And if all the I-bankers, and all the commercially successful, and all the entrepreneurs do half as well for the social good of the fabric as the preachers and teachers did, then Bates will continue to be well-served. I pray that that particular inheritance always is at the center of who we are and what we do.

The third thing I want to say in my alliterative title about being peculiar and particular, is that the thing that’s always enchanted me about Bates and was part of my own experience is that we are a community of promise. That is to say, we always take what is and we work it and shape it and move it toward what ought to be. Every one of us who was admitted into Bates College got here as an exercise in promise. Those of you in the golden classes and before that, most of you were admitted on the hunches of Harry Rowe. None of you were admitted on your own merits. You know that and I know that, and it’s time the world knew that. Nobody deserved to be here, but somehow between the grace of god and Harry Rowe, you got in. And you were allowed to stay, more or less by your own efforts.

My generation and those immediately before and immediately after had the same benevolent act of kindness exercised on us by Milt Lindholm. We didn’t deserve to be here either. We hadn’t stood at the gates and demanded admission. We hoped for the best and we took what we got. And so did Bates. And what it did was see the promise in each of us, whatever it was. And sometimes Bates saw more promise in us than we saw in ourselves. And sometimes Bates saw more promise in our future than we could possibly imagine in our present.

So this was and remains a college of promise. It takes the raw material of youth — full of arrogant ambition and a certain amount of fear and trepidation. And over four years, it works its magic on us, and we graduate into the world far wiser, far better than we were when we arrived. We are entrusted with a promise, that we will not fail Bates’ investment in us as we make our way. The way we return on that investment is of course to find other young people of promise, for whom Bates will work its continual magic. And the cycle goes on and on.

We are a community of promise, and in recognizing the promise in the young, we affirm the promise of the future, and we affirm that great investment that our ancestors made, when in 1855 they decided that a different form and style of education was now needed in Maine for people otherwise deprived. And 10 years later, their ambition emerged in what we now know as Bates College.

I hope that no matter how successful we become, how famous and rich we may eventually be, how influential we might become in the world of higher education, that we will neither forget nor ever be ashamed of those modest origins, those peculiar, particular, pious foundations, upon which our great promise has been laid and by which it has been nourished. All worldly success will amount to nothing if we forget those origins. And all our success, deserved and undeserved, will be amplified and modified by the confidence of our ancestors, who saw greater things than they themselves were capable of delivering.

So when you hear the great names read out — when you hear of Oren Burbank Cheney and George Colby Chase, Clifton Daggett Gray and Charles Franklin Phillips, President Reynolds, President Howard, President Hansen, and all those who are to follow — when you hear those names, remember that they are custodians of a great hope, a great promise, a great dream. We are only the current fruit on that great tree. But it is a wonderful tree and a wonderful set of roots to have, and this is the day in which we celebrate it.

I come from Plymouth, Mass., famous for Gov. William Bradford, who in his history describing the little Plymouth colonies that thus out of small beginnings great things have been done — far greater than could have been imagined in 1620.

I think of that phrase when I think of Bates College: “Thus out of small beginnings.” Who could have imagined this college flourishing as it does today. We always knew we were number one, but how nice it is for the rest of the world finally to catch up with what we have always known. Who would have imagined it? This is a sign not only that the rest of the world is smarter than we might think. but also that our promise is coming into fulfillment. Indeed, our best days are ahead of us. Building on such a firm foundation as this, we can only go from strength to strength.

Our children, our grandchildren, our great grandchildren will inherit that of which we are merely trustees and custodians. But they will be as grateful to us as we are to our ancestors for providing so wonderful, so splendid, so provoking, so peculiar, so particular, and so promising a place as is Bates.

I say to us, happy birthday, whichever one it is, and may there be many, many, many more to come. Never forget the past, and the future will take care of itself