{"id":133603,"date":"2020-05-28T13:09:11","date_gmt":"2020-05-28T17:09:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=133603"},"modified":"2021-02-10T09:06:47","modified_gmt":"2021-02-10T14:06:47","slug":"transformative-the-bates-mission-statement-at-10","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2020\/05\/28\/transformative-the-bates-mission-statement-at-10\/","title":{"rendered":"Transformative: The Bates Mission Statement at age 10"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

During one of the spring 2010 meetings that ultimately produced Bates\u2019 current mission statement, the working group hit a roadblock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPeople were going back and forth about ways to look at something, and we were not coming to a consensus,\u201d recalls Leslie Hill, associate professor of politics and a member of the mission statement subcommittee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then a student, one of four in the 14-member group, spoke up. \u201cHe spoke passionately. He articulated the issue in terms that were clear to him and, I think, different for some of the rest of us, but that brought some insight into what we were talking about,\u201d Hill says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

+<\/span>The Bates College Mission Statement<\/a><\/h5>
\n

Since 1855, Bates College has been dedicated to the emancipating potential of the liberal arts. Bates educates the whole person through creative and rigorous scholarship in a collaborative residential community. With ardor and devotion\u2014 Amore ac Studio<\/em> \u2014 we engage the transformative power of our differences, cultivating intellectual discovery and informed civic action. Preparing leaders sustained by a love of learning and a commitment to responsible stewardship of the wider world, Bates is a college for coming times.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnd I just remember thinking, \u2018Wow, it is terrific that this young person could really open this back up again.\u2019 He created an opportunity for us to hear each other better. And I was so impressed by that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adopted 10 years ago this month, the 77-word Bates mission statement has become a touchstone for the college community. \u201cAny college that leads its mission statement with an affirmation of the \u2018emancipating potential of the liberal arts\u2019 is a place I want to be,\u201d Clayton Spencer said at the ceremony announcing her appointment as college president, in December 2011.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And as Hill’s story suggests, the statement resulted from a collaboration that, a decade later, remains a bright memory for the people involved. “Other than those wonderful moments I have with students, that process was the most delightful thing I’ve been associated with at Bates,\u201d says Rebecca Herzig, who chaired the Mission and Purposes Subcommittee that crafted the statement as part of Bates\u2019 decadal accreditation review.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"In<\/a>
\u201cI\u2019m continually struck by how frequently and how divergently Bates people pull on the mission statement,\u201d says Rebecca Herzig, who chaired the group that produced the statement. Professor of gender and sexuality studies, Herzig is shown in her Pettengill Hall office in 2016. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe committee was wonderful,\u201d says Herzig, a professor of gender and sexuality studies. \u201cJust a marvelous, committed, smart group that represented a lot of facets of Bates.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paul Gastonguay \u201989, a committee member and the college’s tennis coach, agrees. \u201cEveryone on the committee took great care to ensure that all of Bates\u2019 foundational and essential characteristics were authentically represented.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Settling on a mission statement, whether existing or new, is an essential step in the college’s accreditation review. The statement is \u201cthe standard by which our performance on all the other standards is measured\u201d during the review process, Herzig explains. (The 2000 review proceeded from the 1990 mission statement. And, yes, accreditation review is happening again now \u2014 but there are no plans to change the mission statement.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Starting in February 2010 and facing a hard deadline \u2014 that May\u2019s meeting of the Board of Trustees, whose approval would activate the statement \u2014 \u201cwe were working fast.\u201d They had just three months not just to forge a draft, but to secure buy-in from \u201cas many possible individuals and constituencies as we could,\u201d Herzig explains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnd we did it” \u2014 winning unanimous approval from the trustees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Ads in The Bates Student<\/em> were a means of getting students’ views on the draft mission statement.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

From start to finish, in fact, the process was painstakingly consultative. \u201cWe sought out expertise wherever we could find it,\u201d says Herzig. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe talked to poets about tone and rhythm. We talked to classicists about various interpretations of the motto,\u201d the Latin Amore ac Studio<\/em> (\u201cwith ardor and devotion\u201d). \u201cWe talked to archivists about text we could mine for ideas, and to alumni about what stuck with them most about their Bates educations.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To reach students, the team held a “Mission Night” in Commons, put a draft of the statement on napkin holders in the Den, ran ads in The Bates Student<\/em>, and got air time on campus radio station WRBC-FM. They even showed the draft to prospective families visiting campus, who were surprised \u201cthat we might care what they thought,” Herzig says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The speed of creating the statement is all the more striking when you consider the thematic burden the Mission and Purposes Subcommittee had to bear. First of all, of course, the statement needed to, er, state what Bates does: It \u201ceducates the whole person through creative and rigorous scholarship in a collaborative residential community.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there were aspirational values to assert and to align<\/a> with that academic function \u2014 imperatives of equity and inclusion and of environmental sustainability, for instance, not to mention the hoped-for ethical posture of Bates graduates. And there were guiding voices to summon forth, notably those of Bates founder Oren Cheney (whose \u201ccollege for coming time\u201d gained an “s” for clarity \u2014 \u201ccoming times\u201d) and of educator and civil rights leader Rev. Benjamin Mays, Class of 1920.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Discussing<\/a>
\u201cThere was some real wrestling around the phrase \u2018transformative power,\u2019\u201d recalls Leslie Hill, associate professor of politics. She is pictured leading a Martin Luther King Day workshop in 2017. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Mays, in fact, inspired one of the most-cited phrases in the mission statement. In Born to Rebel<\/em>, his autobiography, he credited the college with \u201cmaking it possible for me to emancipate myself, to accept with dignity my own worth as a free man.\u201d The mission statement, in turn, leads off with the college’s dedication to \u201cthe emancipating potential of the liberal arts.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Equally powerful is \u201cthe transformative power of our differences,” which is not only a potent phrase in and of itself but, in its context in the mission statement, is revealed as the engine of the Bates enterprise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not surprisingly, \u201cthere was some real wrestling around the phrase \u2018transformative power,\u2019\u201d as Leslie Hill recalls. The subcommittee needed to reconcile Bates’ historic invocation of diversity with a contemporary understanding of equity and inclusion. \u201cIt has a different meaning and, of course, different opportunities and possibilities,\u201d Hill says. Moreover, they needed to make inclusiveness \u201cmore substantial \u2014 not simply to add \u2018different faces\u2019 to the community, but rather figure out how their presences enrich the community.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Crafting the mission statement \u201cgave us an opportunity to articulate and debate what we really think we\u2019re trying to do.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In short, there was a lot to load into a text that, the subcommittee believed, needed to be much shorter than its 283-word predecessor. “In its conciseness, the new statement gave us bite-sized values, priorities, and action steps that we could look at, understand, recite, and act upon,\u201d says Marianne Cowan \u201992, a member of the subcommittee who is now Associate Director of Program Design for Bates\u2019 Center for Purposeful Work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnd it gave us something to talk about to an external audience \u2014 especially, perhaps, the 17-year-old high school student \u2014 so they understand who we are and what\u2019s important to us.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s a testament to the subcommittee’s powers of perception, distillation, and balance that, 10 years later, the Bates mission statement is so present in the daily life of the college. It has been the basis for admission essays and has informed course design. And its language resonates in campus proclamations large and small.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
The mission statement \u201cseems like a sort of romanticized or idealistic vision of who we are, but it’s really much more than that,\u201d says Professor of Religion Marcus Bruce ’77, shown leading a class in 2016. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI’m continually struck by how frequently and how divergently Bates people pull on the mission statement,\u201d Herzig says. \u201cPeople call on it as a tool to crack open conversations, to move forward with ambitions, projects, hopes. They use it to critique things that they find troubling. \u2018Why aren’t we living up to the mission in this way?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part of that utility, naturally, resides in those 77 words themselves. But the process itself of assembling them, she says, also influenced the Bates culture. \u201cIt gave us an opportunity to articulate and debate what we really think we’re trying to do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One student on the subcommittee has carried insights from that process into his professional life. Now a postdoctoral research fellow at The New School for Social Research, Mikey Pasek \u201912 earned a doctorate in social psychology at Penn State and now studies how people with different ethnic and religious identities cooperate or clash with one another across group lines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Mikey Pasek \u201912. (Courtesy of Mikey Pasek)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Thanks to his mission statement experience, \u201cI pay acute attention to the way that organizations and colleges describe their mission,\u201d Pasek says. \u201cUnderstanding how a school sees itself tells me a lot about whether it is the type of organization I\u2019d want to dedicate myself to.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s a harsh irony that the Bates mission statement’s 10th anniversary comes just as fate, in the form of COVID-19, is challenging the college and its guiding ethos in ways that could have hardly been predicted. For most of the past decade, for example, one of the statement’s concepts most taken for granted was Bates’ essential nature as a \u201cresidential community.\u201d But no one’s taking it for granted these days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, as another member of the 2010 mission statement subcommittee points out, that statement itself carries the seeds of its own re-invention. \u201cIt seems like a sort of romanticized or idealistic vision of who we are, but it’s really much more than that,\u201d says Marcus Bruce \u201977, professor of religious studies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs we try to get oriented in the midst of crisis, especially one that impacts us on so many different levels, it’s important to have that mission statement as a guide in terms of our history and our vision of ourselves at a particular period of time and what we envision for the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think it’s really important.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
An announcement of the 2012 redesign of Bates Magazine<\/em> referenced the mission statement’s adaptation of words by Bates founder Oren Cheney.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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