{Also see Bates People in the News for more news items.]

That Story’s Got Legs
As colleges dropping the SAT requirement continue to multiply, so do Bates’ media appearances as an authority on the trend. On NBC’s Sept. 20 Nightly News with Brian Williams, Bates was prominent in a piece titled “Will the SAT soon be history?”

Also that month, ABC’s World News Sunday reporter Bob Jamieson spent a day at Bates reporting on the topic. He visited a class and talked with President Elaine Tuttle Hansen, as well as with Vice President Bill Hiss ’66, who spearheaded both the College’s optional-SAT policy and a subsequent 20-year study showing the test’s limitations as a predictor of academic success. The piece aired Oct. 8.

Faculty and students also got some network action. An expert in Muslim politics, visiting professor Eric Hooglund talked with Fox News in August about Saudi Arabia’s precarious moral leadership in the Middle East. And Alli Caine ’07 spoke with CNN in June during the International Vicuña Festival in Peru (page 5, “Ends of a Campaign”).

Talking about television, meanwhile, was Associate Professor of Rhetoric Stephanie Kelley-Romano, who helped the Portland Press Herald explain the American Idol phenomenon in September. (All of which brings to mind the advice that The New York Times, among other news organizations, highlighted from historian David McCullough’s Commencement address at Bates: “However little television you watch, watch less.”)

SHORT TERMS Staff photographer Phyllis Graber Jensen and Bates Museum of Art director Mark Bessire were among local folks quoted by The Boston Sunday Globe in a June travel story about Lewiston-Auburn…. Wired magazine also talked to Bessire about the museum exhibition Cryptozoology…. The New Yorker previewed an appearance by The Black Factory, Bates lecturer William Pope.L’s provocative performance-art piece, making its second national tour…. Anthropologist Bruce Bourque contributed to an important eco-historical study, which Science featured in June, about the degradation of coastal waters…. Speaking to widespread concerns about global warming and diminishing polar ice was another study, published in the Norwegian science magazine Forskning (“Research”), about the deleterious effects on the arctic food chain posed by reduced ice cover. Bates biologist Will Ambrose and protégé Kelton McMahon ’05 contributed to the research…. On the “glass half full” side of the environment beat, the local NBC affiliate talked with geology professor Beverly Johnson and other Bates people about the College’s increasing interest in biofuel…. Finally, in an August Press Herald, physics and astronomy lecturer Gene Clough put a positive spin on Pluto’s demotion to “dwarf planet” status. ‘’It can be a leader of the dwarf planets,’’ joked Clough.