{"id":1213,"date":"2010-04-21T16:24:03","date_gmt":"2010-04-21T16:24:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hub-dev.bates.edu\/magazine\/?page_id=1213"},"modified":"2017-09-06T11:38:59","modified_gmt":"2017-09-06T15:38:59","slug":"preamble","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/back-issues\/y2006\/summer06\/departments\/preamble\/","title":{"rendered":"PreAmble"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"In Bates Through the Years,<\/em> Charlie Clark \u201951 offers this historical insight: The Board of Trustees, prior to approving President Phillips\u2019 radical new academic calendar in 1964, did not know that students and faculty loathed the new schedule.<\/p>\n

(\u201cLoathed\u201d is my word; Charlie\u2019s phrasing is more restrained and insightful, twin skills employed throughout the book, which won Clark the 2006 Sesquicentennial Prize for alumni achievement in literature or science.)<\/p>\n

Back to \u201964. The longer academic year emphasized a pedal-to-the-floor acceleration of the liberal arts experience from four years to three. Reflecting campus sentiment, The Bates Student<\/em> grumbled, \u201cOne Bates mill is enough.\u201d But this all escaped the trustees. Perhaps the board took its lead from the president. Or, to borrow a phrase from Virginia Wright\u2019s story on recent changes in how Bates governs itself (\u201cBoard Plan\u201d), the trustees were simply not \u201cself-critical\u201d about their performance.<\/p>\n

The Bates board has since morphed into a dynamic, fluid institution whose bylaws and culture enable it to take a chance on bringing aboard talented thirtysomethings. And thanks to the Oral History Project of the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library, we have a clue as to how the board came to be this way. In fact, as the oral record shows, the board owes its evolution to E. Robert Kinney \u201939, now a trustee emeritus who turned 89 in April.<\/p>\n

Kinney joined the board in 1960. By the mid-1980s, he\u2019d been board chair for about a dozen years. Then only in his mid-60s, he was on a trajectory to serve until, well, now. And he didn\u2019t fancy the prospect. \u201cAs smart as some people are when they\u2019re 75 or 80 or whatever…you\u2019ve got to have younger people,\u201d Kinney told oral historian Andrea L\u2019Hommedieu.\u00a0\u201cThey stimulate thinking. You should want<\/em> to renew; you need new blood.\u201d<\/p>\n

Employing \u201ca little politicking,\u201d Kinney got the board to support a resolution mandating age-70 retirements. The key vote came from Ed Muskie \u201936. \u201cI went to Ed, and I said, \u2018You know, I\u2019m not going to succeed unless I can get some help from somebody over 70…. I need your vote,\u2019\u201d Kinney said.<\/p>\n

President Reynolds, meanwhile, didn\u2019t want to lose his longtime chairman. According to Kinney, Reynolds urged him to stay on as a grandfathered member. Kinney said no: \u201c\u2019I\u2019m going to quit because I believe in it.\u2019 And I still do. I don\u2019t think anybody should run a business in America longer than 10 years at the most.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ironically, there was an upside to the trustees\u2019 rubber stamp of the longer calendar in 1964. Though the new format lasted just four years, and though the three-year emphasis disappeared from College recruitment publications, subsequent calendar revisions have retained one signature element.<\/p>\n

Indeed, if you still recall fondly the warmth of the May sun at Bates, or happily losing track of the day of the week, or flying down Tuckerman on a weekend getaway, or enduring\/enjoying Cell Hell, or ending a day with a barbecue, give thanks to the inadvertent achievement of those trustees long ago: Short Term, which marked its 40th iteration this spring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Bates Through the Years, Charlie Clark \u201951 offers this historical insight:…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":221,"featured_media":0,"parent":1190,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_dimp_site_id":"","_dimp_override_contact":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"class_list":["post-1213","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1213"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11298,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1213\/revisions\/11298"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}