Friends: What a pleasure to be here together in this handsome place to celebrate both the character and standing of a great college, and to salute a bright new era for Bates under the leadership of Elaine Tuttle Hansen.

I have been given the pleasure of introducing you to your new president - or as my marching orders go - to give the Bates community, in two minutes, preferably less, deeper insight into its new president. It took me about 20 minutes to read what you have about Elaine on your own Web site, so I am not sure I can add very much more than you already know, though I have been a colleague of Elaine's since she came to Haverford College more than 20 years ago.

But having both been a college president myself for a very long time and having made a study of the breed up close in my role at the Mellon Foundation these past five years, I may have a few insights to share. And, I can at least recite some of the necessary requisites for the post, which Bart Giamatti, writing as president of Yale, I remind you, said was no way for an adult to make a living.

Elaine comes to the presidency of Bates with all the necessary virtues: She is well and broadly schooled; has excellent scholarly credentials and accomplishments; has been an extremely popular teacher; and, as Tom Tritton, president of Haverford College, said of Elaine as provost, she proved something rare in administrative service: You can work in a very difficult job for seven years and, at the end of that period, have people thinking more highly of you than when you started. But, perhaps most propitious is her name. All influential presidents have and use three full names - the use of an initial sets up the possibility for a mediocre reign. William Raney Harper, Nicholas Murray Butler, Hanna Holborn Gray - you get the point.

But, you know all this about Elaine or you would not have invited her to come to Bates. So in reviewing what I know about Elaine's life and times to try to give you a sense of your president before she was your president, I found myself pondering what special qualities did Elaine acquire as a result of her having lived, studied and worked in so many institutional and geographic settings? What characteristics were developed and talents honed as a result of these peregrinations across America, from the Bay State of Massachusetts to Minnesota, which cannot decide whether it is the North Star or Gopher State; to Washington, the Evergreen State; to Michigan (again, a confused Midwestern state: is it the Great Lakes or the Wolverine State?); then back East to the Empire State of New York; and, finally, to the Keystone State of Pennsylvania.

Most pertinent, too, must be the effects on Elaine's development of living under the various mottos of these states, from the casual tone set by the Washington of her graduate days ("By and By") to the "Excelsior" or "Ever Upward" of her first academic teaching post - all of which must have readied her for Maine's motto, superb for a new president: "I Direct."

But seriously, experience with this mix of great research universities (Minnesota, Washington and Michigan) and some of the finest liberal arts colleges (Mount Holyoke, Hamilton, and Haverford-Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore) is very rare in someone's professional experience these days. This experience, I believe, gives your new president an unusually broad and personal understanding of American higher education, which should stand Bates in good stead as it continues to brighten this special corner of Maine, the Pine Tree State; as it wisely strengthens its relationship with its good colleagues in Brunswick and Waterville; and as it makes an ever more convincing case for the particular virtues of a personal education in an intimate, residential, liberal arts college.

As those of us from Bryn Mawr and Haverford colleges prepared to give our Elaine away to Bates, we had only a few reservations: Had life at football-less Haverford adequately prepared Elaine to nestle down amongst the Bobcats? And had life in the balmy mid-Atlantic states for the past 20 years so thinned her blood that she would fail, first time out, at participating in your bone-chilling tradition, the puddle jump? (A tradition, which we consoled ourselves, should just be best left to lifelong Bobcats anyway.)

But in all seriousness, Bates and Haverford colleges have much in common, which is what I think attracted Elaine to you - a commitment to intellectual rigor and academic excellence combined with a belief that the educated bear special responsibilities to serve and work to improve the lot of those less fortunate than themselves.

Elaine, Stan, Emma and Isla bring much to Bates and to Lewiston as a family. Sad as the Bryn Mawr-Haverford community is to lose them, we congratulate you on your good fortune and wish the Hansens and the Bates community a long, distinguished and happy history together.