For Mother Jones, in a Sept. 24 article headlined “How America’s Elite Colleges Breed High-Status Careers—and Misery,” journalist Evan Mandery named Bates as an outlier — for its emphasis on meaning and purpose. Mandery writes that a focus on finding meaning “suffuses the Bates curriculum,” unlike many other elite colleges that he covered in his story.
In looking beyond the classroom, Mandery points again to Bates: “One notable exception is the Center for Purposeful Work at Bates College, launched in 2017 and framed around principles of developmental psychology. The center’s work is predicated on a simple premise: ‘If you’ve got wellbeing in your career,’ explained director Allen Delong, ‘you are twice as likely to have wellbeing in all the other areas of your life.’”
The article points to the college’s commitment to supporting students seeking meaningful work, noting that Bates subsidizes around 600 internships each year, “about as many as Harvard, though its endowment is less than 1 percent as large,” and notes that this commitment shows up in outcomes: “15 percent of its 2023 graduates went into education (five times the rate of Harvard grads), 16 percent entered the health field (more than twice the rate of Harvard grads), and 5 percent joined nonprofits.”
With the Bates College Museum of Art’s Ralph Steadman exhibition due to close on Oct. 11, WGME CBS 13 interviewed co-curator Andrea Harris about the exhibition. Harris co-curated the exhibition, “And Another Thing”, with Steadman’s daughter, Sadie Williams. Not quite a retrospective, the exhibition spans 65 years and is drawn from 15,000 works of art. The reporter asked Harris, “How did you get this to come to little old Bates College in Lewiston, Maine?”
“Well, Ralph is all about collaboration and he gets around,” Harris said. “He’s been to the United States several times and has been meeting people throughout his career. One of the meetings he had, he was up in Aspen, Colorado, where he met with Dan Mills, who was the director of the Bates College Museum of Art. And Dan was always a fan of Ralph’s, had always had a great feeling that bringing the art to Maine would be an incredible experience for the community. “
Initially the exhibition was slated to open in 2020 but was delayed because of the pandemic. “And here we are having this incredible opportunity in Maine and it’s been wonderful,” Harris said. “The Bates Museum of Art is this beautiful space. It’s just absolutely incredible for the college students, for the community, and again, available to everyone to come out and enjoy.”
The exhibition opened in June and will close on Saturday, Oct. 11. Harris will offer a lecture to the public on Friday, Oct. 10 at 4 p.m. and will be present on the closing day to engage with visitors. The Bates College Museum of Art is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Stephanie Kelley-Romano, professor of rhetoric, film and screen studies, was featured on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s podcast College Matters, a series that examines “how higher education pushes students to wrestle with big ideas.” Kelley-Romano’s popular course, “Conspiracy Rhetoric: Power, Politics and Popular Culture,” was highlighted in the podcast episode “Course Catalog: Decoding — and Fighting — Conspiracy Theories” as one of “the most intriguing and popular courses on the nation’s college campuses.”
“Conspiracy Rhetoric,” which Kelley-Romano is teaching again this fall, focuses on the ways that rhetoric — the art of effective (and often persuasive) communication — shapes conspiracy theories. Kelley-Romano explains that “when students understand how things function rhetorically, then they can see and create rhetorical campaigns.” She told the Chronicle that the course often helps students understand that “when more people have more rights and more support, the entire society does better.”
Leigh Weisenburger, vice president for institutional affairs and secretary to the Board of Trustees, was featured in a Portland Press Herald article about Bates dropping its application fee for all students. (In the past, students could ask for a waiver for the fee based on their financial needs). In the story, Weisenburger, who played a role in the elimination of the application fee, said, “It just seemed like the right moment to press play on something that we know to be a barrier and will provide relief, economically for families, but also de-escalating any stress a student might have in the process.” Bates anticipates more applications in the coming year, following a record 10,029 applications in 2024, and is prepared to accommodate the potential increase with a higher number of adjunct readers.
Vice President for Finance and Administration and Treasurer of Bates College Geoff Swift was recently featured in the Sun Journal’s ongoing feature “Face Time.” Swift was interviewed about Lake Andrews, his role in nurturing the campus’ physical environment, and Bates’ responsibility for the wildlife that makes its home around the Puddle. “We’re stewards of this place,” Swift said. “Bates sits on 133 acres, much of them occupied by residential buildings, sports fields and academic facilities. But the green spaces, from the quad to the wooded areas, are also under our charge and we take that seriously. Respecting wildlife is part of that. There are limits to what we can or should do.”
Sports Business Journal covered the appointment of Jeff Price ’87 P’29 as the inaugural CEO of the Heisman Trophy Trust. Prior to this role, Price served as chief commercial and philanthropy officer for the PGA of America. “I see plenty of opportunity to build a larger commercial enterprise and support the Trust’s charitable goals, which were also a passion of mine at the PGA,” Price told Sports Business Journal. Price, who played football at Bates — as quarterback and wide receiver — is also a parent of a student in the Class of 2029. Price was recently on campus for the 150th Football Celebration at Bates.
News of Associate Professor of Art and Visual Culture Carolina González Valencia’s Sundance Documentary Fund grant of $50,000 to finish her film How to Clean a House in Ten Easy Steps was covered in Deadline. The Sundance Institute funded 32 projects this year.
In August, Deadline covered Gonzalez Valencia’s Points North Fellowship, which supports filmmakers in developing their pitches, and invites them to present their works in progress to a panel of funders and distributors at Camden International Film Festival. The film, which is being shot in the U.S., Colombia, and Mexico, is a “hybrid documentary” in which a domestic worker and her filmmaker daughter co-create the fictional character of a writer to uncover the slippage between truth and fantasy. It tells a story about immigration, labor, dreams, and the power of fiction to spark emancipation.
