{"id":792,"date":"2010-04-21T16:12:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-21T16:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hub-dev.bates.edu\/magazine\/?page_id=792"},"modified":"2017-09-06T11:38:47","modified_gmt":"2017-09-06T15:38:47","slug":"bates-matters-4","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/back-issues\/y2007\/spring07\/departments\/bates-matters-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Bates Matters: President for a Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Elaine Hansen<\/em><\/p>\n

In offering a Bates student the chance to be president for a day, my primary goal was educational. I wanted students to learn that their insights about the College can be enriched by a deeper understanding of the issues, offices, and constituencies comprising the modern administration of a place like Bates.<\/p>\n

But there was also a self-centered motive, as I wanted a good reason to get out of the office (and the meetings, conference calls, and airports) for some first-hand experience myself.<\/p>\n

True, I\u2019ve been a professor most of my adult life, but I needed to update and localize \u2014 at Bates \u2014 my sense of student life. And so, a Bates student and I traded places.<\/p>\n

On and off campus, I love to extol this College\u2019s intellectual vitality, yet the reality of my classroom experience was even better than my rhetoric.<\/p>\n

Attending three very different classes, in sociology, philosophy, and psychology, I witnessed uniformly excellent academic work. I saw students strenuously exercising the muscles of the mind and grappling with the kind of big questions that define a liberal arts education: How do power and privilege work, at Bates and beyond? Should actions be guided by reason or faith? What are the forces that shape human identity?<\/p>\n

In the classes I attended, professors effectively used different pedagogical strategies befitting their audience and the material, deftly guiding their students\u2019 encounters with difficult texts and issues.<\/p>\n

Sociologist Emily Kane drew on small-group work completed before class to develop and field questions about the reading as it applied to real, local contexts.<\/p>\n

Philosopher James Swan-Tuite lectured on a dense treatise but with a level of accessibility that made it feel like a conversation.<\/p>\n

In Krista Scottham\u2019s psychology class, small groups of students, working as both teammates and sparring partners, presented their findings based on recent research. Scottham listened, prodded, and then brilliantly summed up.<\/p>\n

I realized just how many parts of our community had drawn me toward them during the day.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Walking across campus, picking up my lunch in the Den, or working at the Pettengill reception desk, I felt connected to people who stopped and talked to me in a different way.<\/p>\n

At Slovenski Track, track coach Jay Hartshorn built an inclusive team identity by starting practice with some show and tell, in which first-years shared a favorite possession and explained its meaning. Sitting in this circle of friendly young folk, I realized just how many parts of our community had drawn me toward them during the day.<\/p>\n

At Bates, the classroom experience, so rich and central, is embedded within a durable fabric of human interaction, woven by a variety of remarkably talented people.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President Hansen and Meaghan Creedon ’08 explain together what they learned by switching jobs for a day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":221,"featured_media":0,"parent":785,"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-792","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/792","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=792"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/792\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13363,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/792\/revisions\/13363"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}