Mainebiz<\/em> reporter Laurie Schreiber writes that “Bonney\u2019s design approach \u2014 with versatile spaces that promote interaction and teamwork \u2014 reflects a 21st-century pedagogy that leaves behind the conventional lecture-followed-by-lab model and instead encourages hands-on student engagement, innovation, inclusivity and transparency.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Schreiber reports that the Bonney Center is part of a sweeping effort to revamp and modernize the college’s STEM spaces, including Carnegie Science Hall and Dana Chemistry Hall, that “touches nearly 174,000 square feet” of Bates STEM space, with a keen focus on building and sustaining a sense of community and mutual support among faculty and students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In terms of achieving greater equity in STEM teaching, the Bonney building is “a leveler,” explains Bates President Clayton Spencer. “Bonney will allow us to optimize excellence as it\u2019s understood now, which is to be inclusive with a wide range of interests and backgrounds, and to give students early experience” in science research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dean of the Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs Malcolm Hill tells Schreiber that “you can\u2019t overlook the fact that facilities like this are a clear signal about our serious commitment to doing intellectual scholarly work at a high level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOur scientists on the faculty, who are nationally recognized scholars in their own right, have a new facility that they can do their work in. That fosters a sense that this is the place you want to be, and helps us as we think about recruiting the next generation of faculty to the campus.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n In his editor’s note, Peter Van Allen puts the investment into the context of recent Lewiston economic development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Lewiston is seeing a surge of investment. Maine\u2019s second-largest city has historic buildings, raw space and ample room for growth. The ingredients have been in place, but now the city is cooking up something special,” he writes. “Bates College is investing millions of dollars in STEM education, led by President Clayton Spencer.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Read the story: “Science on display: Bates College\u2019s new STEM center is designed for the 21st century<\/a>,” Mainebiz, June 14, 2021<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Boston Globe<\/em> checks in with Katie Burke \u201903, chief people officer at HubSpot, for a story about the look and feel of post-pandemic in-person work spaces. For one, meetings will likely be a lot shorter, with people less willing to sit together in rooms for long periods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More broadly, Burke says that businesses must think both about \u201cthe workspace we want to go back to\u201d and \u201cthe workforce we want to create,\u201d versus \u201creacting to the things that have changed overnight because of COVID-19.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Professor of Politics and Faculty Fellow in Student Affairs Stephen Engel was a guest on WOSU Public Media\u2019s All Sides with Ann Fisher, <\/em>tackling an array of LGBTQ+ related topics as Pride Month celebrations returned with gusto after a quiet 2020 due to the pandemic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Engel, who is coauthor of a new book, Disrupting Dignity: Rethinking Power and Progress in LGBTQ Lives<\/em> (NYU Press, 2021), spoke about using the return of Pride as an opportunity to embrace it with fresh perspective, welcoming the concept of \u201cliving extra.\u201d Engel\u2019s coauthor is Timothy Lyle, an assistant professor of English at Iona College who taught at Bates in 2014\u201315.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Within Engel\u2019s field of constitutional law, the concept of dignity has become a cornerstone of gay rights, but it\u2019s important to remain \u201ca little bit skeptical\u201d of what the word implies and even dictates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDignity often connotes a kind of strength, a quietness,\u201d he said, but the LGBTQ+ community shouldn\u2019t shy away from living loudly. \u201cIn our search for rights recognition we have often been compelled to silence,\u201d he said. \u201cTo kind of treat our equality as sameness to the norm as opposed to embracing our full humanity.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Vineyard Gazette <\/em>profiles Jim Athearn \u201970 and his family, owners of Morning Glory Farm, \u201ca community fixture\u201d on Martha’s Vineyard, writes Maia Coleman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The farm, Coleman says, \u201cis responsible for a good percentage of the island\u2019s local food resources, and preserving large swaths of land from development \u2014 all governed by basic principles of farming and a guiding philosophy of fairness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Athearn and his wife, Debbie, are now turning farm operations over to their children. And while farm operations adapt and change, the family piece of the puzzle stays the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe community has been telling us every year they want this to be happening,\u201d Debbie said. \u201cThe customers wanting us to do it is the positive reinforcement that we get. It\u2019s the driving force.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cStunning,\u201d is how Book Trib<\/em> reviewer Claudia Keenan describes a new book by Assistant Professor of History Andrew Baker that \u201clays bare [the] legacy\u201d of an infamous mass assault on a Black neighborhood in New Orleans in 1900.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To Poison a Nation: The Murder of Robert Charles and the Rise of Jim Crow Policing <\/em>chronicles how Charles resisted arrest on a July night in 1900, wounding a police officer in the process, which prompted a three-day manhunt and white mob-led siege of Charles\u2019 neighborhood. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Charles killed seven white men before his own death in a bloody shootout, and the violence of his acts was then used for justification for continued attacks against the Black community. \u201cAs Baker leads the reader across a century, from the 1870s to the 1970s, he demonstrates how Jim Crow transformed itself in the modern era but never went extinct,\u201d Keenan writes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile Kirkus<\/em> also weighed in on To Poison a Nation<\/em> in June, describing its \u201cintricate narrative\u201d and calling it \u201ca nuanced history of a Black man unable to improve his status in a racist world who was ultimately no longer willing to cower to white hostility.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Adrian Gomez of the Albuquerque Journal<\/em> talks to best-selling author Lisa Genova ’92, who appears in a new PBS documentary, Build a Better Memory Through Science.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Gomez notes that Genova has \u201ccaptured a special place in contemporary fiction, writing stories that are equally inspired by neuroscience and the human spirit,\u201d through books like Still Alice<\/em>, Left Neglected<\/em>, Love Anthony<\/em>, Inside the O\u2019Briens<\/em>, and Every Note Played<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her first nonfiction book, Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting<\/em>, was published in March.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the vast majority of people worried about their memory, Genova has this advice: You can\u2019t recall a memory that you don\u2019t have. \u201cWhat it boils down to for 99% of people is that we don\u2019t pay attention.\u201d We need to be more mindful and present. \u201cYou can\u2019t form a memory if it never enters the memory.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Portland Press Herald<\/em>\u2019s poetry column featured “Bluebells” by Lecturer in English Myronn Hardy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Introducing the poem, Megan Grambling notes that the \u201cbeautiful lyric poem\u201d reminds us that \u201cspringtime is not all ease and release: The transition away from winter and dark can sometimes have its difficult or bittersweet moments.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The New York Times<\/em> praises Brennen Malone \u201917 in his role as Juicy, the Hamlet character in an update of Shakespeare that’s set at a Southern barbecue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reviewer Jesse Green says that Juicy is \u201cas unusual a hero as Hamlet was, but less for what he might become than for what he already is. Asthmatic and \u2018thicc,\u2019 he variously calls himself weird, an empath, and \u2018a big \u2019ole sissy\u2019…. If he is thus a misfit in a world of over-armored men, he is also, in Malone\u2019s lovely, unpushy performance, sexy and sympathetic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMalone delivers Hamlet\u2019s \u2018what a piece of work is man\u2019 speech nearly verbatim but in such a conversational tone that you hear its ambivalence (\u201cMan delights not me: no, nor woman neither\u201d) as if for the first time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this Southern, Black setting, \u201cthe larger social problem of violence against Black men need hardly be spoken,\u201d Green writes. \u201cJuicy just assumes that stories like his family\u2019s must always end in death. \u2018Cause this a tragedy,\u2019 he says. \u2018We tragic.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A Salon<\/em> story, originally published on Undark<\/em>, about the impact of COVID-19 on disabled Americans quotes Professor of English Ther\u00ed Pickens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reporter Izz Scott Lamagdeleine writes that obstacles and oversights faced by disabled people, \u201care more pronounced for members of marginalized communities.\u201d For example, disabled people of color are reported to child welfare systems at a higher rate because they are experiencing both racism and ableism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pickens, who is the author of Black Madness :: Mad Blackness<\/em>, a study of the relationship between Blackness and disability, says members of the Black community may be cautious to identify themselves as disabled because \u201cBlackness in its inception in the U.S. has often been linked with disability as deficiency, so Blackness as disability.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pickens <\/em>also notes that disabled parents, along with Black and Brown communities at-large, haven\u2019t been prioritized for vaccines because of a cultural narrative surrounding the expectation of disability. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For \u201cpeople like us who have a disability but are below the ages of 65 or 70,\u201d she said, \u201cdisability is not expected of us. It is assumed the elderly take precedence because we expect the elderly to be disabled, and that\u2019s a narrative that we understand.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Clothing retailers are moving away from gendered clothing for very young children, but most still have a pink=girls and boys=blue approach, writes Jennifer Barton in InStyle<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAt a time when fashion (and everything else) is making strides toward inclusivity, acceptance, and a richness of expression to match the many ways humans express their identities, this progress is rare to find in the kids\u2019 section\u201d of most clothing retailers, writes Barton.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For clarity, Barton turns to Professor of Sociology Emily Kane, author of The Gender Trap: Parents and the Pitfalls of Raising Boys and Girls.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Yes, it\u2019s troubling, Kane says, that many children \u201cnever get a chance to find out what interests or tendencies they might have if we start color-coding, sorting, and categorizing them before they even have any chance to tell us anything themselves.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Research by Kane and others, Barton writes, \u201cpoints to everything from occupational segregation to wage gaps down the line as issues that are inadvertently reinforced by concepts like hyper-gendered clothing and toys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “It\u2019s not too far-reaching to see how T-shirts branding girls as \u2018Cute\u2019 and boys as \u2018Boss\u2019 show the different values we place on women and men in our society.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n During 2020\u201321, a group of Bates students mentored Lewiston Middle School students with a focus on racial equality, with an initial goal to introduce the concept of implicit bias into the school\u2019s curriculum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cConversations quickly turned to how Black students in middle school were more frequently called out for wearing hats and hoods in school than white students,\u201d writes Lewiston Sun Journal<\/em> reporter Bonnie Washuk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The group ultimately tackled the school dress code, building a case to eliminate a rule that prohibits hats and hoods in school. (Lewiston schools will consider a change this summer.) The Bates students helped the middle-schoolers make their case, but it was most rewarding to watch youngsters \u201ctake ownership and take over\u201d the effort, says Associate Professor of Education Patricia Buck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nearly 60 Bates students volunteered to tutor Lewiston High School students during 2020\u201321, a boon to the local school in a pandemic year that saw high school students struggle with remote instruction. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The tutoring was organized by the high school\u2019s Aspirations Program, named the 2021 Community Partner of the Year by the Maine Campus Compact. The compact is a coalition of 17 college campuses \u2014 including Bates \u2014 whose purpose is to \u201creinvigorate the civic mission of higher education.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A Wallet Hub story about car insurance turns to Thomas Sowell Professor Emeritus of Economics James W. Hughes to explain the question of fairness in car insurance rates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For example, is it fair that companies charge such high rates to insure a teenage male driver? <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI believe most people, when they stop and think about it, think that it is \u2018fair\u2019 for people to pay premiums commensurate with their risk of loss,\u201d Hughes says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThus, teen boys pay more for insurance than a father of three. Is it perfect to group all teen boys as higher risks? No, as there are very safe teen drivers. But the errors there are thought to be fewer than charging one price for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Lewiston Sun Journal <\/em>turns to Erin Reed \u201908, executive director of Trinity Jubilee Center, for a story about the mettle shown by new Mainers in their quest to find jobs, and the support services they now find.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Immigrants represent about 16 percent of the city\u2019s population, says reporter Kathryn Skelton. In their job searches, they get support from a number of agencies, including Trinity Jubilee Center, which helps about 400 people annually with work searches. Most come from the African nations of Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, and Somalia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s harder to get a job without connections, like someone saying, \u2018Oh, my cousin is a manager there, I\u2019ll put in a good word for you,\u2019\u201d said Reed. \u201cBut honestly with some of these immigrants, their work ethic is stronger than whatever barriers they\u2019re facing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Twenty-one years ago, Hannah Sessions ’99 and Greg Bernhardt ’99, both artists, founded Blue Ledge Farm in Salisbury, Vt., and began raising goats. Today, they care for some 200 animals, sell cheese across the Northeast, and \u201calso both still make art,\u201d says Seven Days<\/em> reporter Margaret Grayson, noting Sessions\u2019 recent show of oil paintings<\/a>. (They’re also parents of a Bates sophomore.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sessions says that farming and creating art can complement one another, but \u201cit\u2019s never easy\u201d to do both. \u201cI originally had my studio in the upstairs of one of our barns,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd it was way too distracting. I heard the goats all the time.\u201d Now, she can’t even see the goat barn from her studio, which works better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMy actual time with a paintbrush in my hand is pretty small,\u201d she says. \u201cBut I\u2019m thinking about it all the time. And I\u2019m seeing things. I\u2019m thinking, \u2018How would I paint that?\u2019 And so, generally, when I do sit down to paint, it\u2019s just almost immediately a flow state.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the Globe Magazine<\/em>\u2019s Connection column, writer Samanthan Shanley talks about her long relationship with her favorite aunt, Elaine Hubbard \u201950, who now has dementia and lives in a nursing home, and how Shanley now keeps in touch through regular phone calls. When they talk, \u201cwe meet wherever she is in time, reliving lush memories of the life she lived.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The New York Times<\/em>\u2019 Mini Vows column describes how Erik Leibovitz \u201913, after meeting Dara Silverman online, asked her to not go out on a date with anyone else before they had the chance to meet in person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Leibovitz\u2019s question, says Times<\/em> reporter Vincent M. Mallozzi, is the kind \u201cthat could have made him yesterday\u2019s news.\u201d He needn\u2019t have worried. \u201cMs. Silverman said that she had fewer social options than Mr. Leibovitz could have ever possibly imagined,\u201d said Mallozi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Silverman had just moved to D.C. \u201cMy furniture truck had not even arrived yet,\u201d she added. \u201cI knew like one new person in my new neighborhood, the cashier at the CVS.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n They were married on April 24 in Jupiter, Fla.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Phyllis](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2021\/06\/210623_Bonney_Move_0349A.jpg\")
Science Center. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College) <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"Phyllis](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2021\/06\/210624_Bonney_Students_0410_2400.jpg\")
![\"Look,](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2021\/05\/210517_CCU_Bonney_3238_dlh.jpg\")
Katie Burke \u201903<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Stephen Engel, Politics faculty<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"At](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2018\/03\/180302_Engel_Lyle_0186_LR.jpg\")
Jim Athearn \u201970<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Andrew Baker, History faculty<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2021\/06\/51JdLpgqjLL.jpeg\")
Lisa Genova \u201992<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Myronn Hardy, English faculty<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Brennen Malone \u201917<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"Colin](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2015\/11\/W_151104_Marie_Nutcracker_05141.jpg\")
Ther\u00ed Pickens, English faculty<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Emily Kane, Sociology faculty<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2019\/08\/kane-190131_Pettengill_3420.jpg\")
Patricia Buck, Education faculty<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Bates student volunteers<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
James Hughes, Economics faculty<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Erin Reed \u201908<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Hannah Sessions \u201999<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2021\/06\/Milking-Time-at-Mose-Farm-Oil-on-Canvas-Hannah-Sessions-24x30-1.jpg\")
Elaine C. Hubbard \u201950<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Erik Leibovitz \u201913<\/h3>\n\n\n\n