Good morning, Bates College!

If you are new to Bates: Welcome! If you are a returning or continuing member of our community: Welcome back!

I am Garry Jenkins, the 9th president of Bates College (my pronouns are he/him), and I am so glad that you all are here, and ready to greet the new academic year at Bates.

Let me offer a particularly warm welcome to our newest students: our transfer students and the members of the Class of 2030! We are so pleased that you have decided to join our community, and we look forward to seeing how you will enrich it, enliven it, and grow and flourish as part of it. 

This ceremony, our Opening Convocation, is our formal welcome of new members into the wonderful Bates community and an ushering in of the new academic year. Let me give you the outline of our program today.

I will offer a few words, and the Class of 2030 and new transfer students will then be welcomed by your student government co-presidents, Ava Steinberger and Mohammad Zayd, both Class of 2027.

Ava is a senior from Delaware. She is majoring in philosophy with a concentration in film and media studies. Prior to becoming BCSG co-president, she was a class representative for three years, serving as chair of the Student Affairs Committee and co-chair of the Presidential Advisory Committee. She is a Bates Votes Fellow, the Bates Philosophy Forum’s senior outreach director, a member of the Bates Civic Health Co-Design Initiative, and a member of the tennis team.

Mohammad is a senior neuroscience major and physics minor, from the Bronx, New York. He is a neuroscience department research assistant, a tour guide coordinator for Admission and Admission Senior Fellow, the South Asian Student Association vice president, the Muslim Student Association co-president, and a member of the STEM Scholars program. 

Following their remarks, we will have the convocation address, delivered by Amy Bradfield Douglass, the Whitehouse Professor of Psychology. The convocation speaker is chosen by the outgoing senior class as a gift to the incoming first-year class—and Professor Douglass was the choice of the Class of 2026 for the Class of 2030.

Professor Douglass is a social psychologist who explores psychology and law, specifically eyewitness testimony, including how witness memory can be profoundly distorted by subtle interactions with other witnesses and investigators.

Her courses at Bates include statistics, psychology and law, psychology of religion, and a first-year seminar titled “The Psychology of Context: How Situations Affect Human Behavior.”

She has written and edited many articles, books, and textbooks, including Wrightsman’s Psychology and the Legal System, the most popular undergraduate textbook for students studying psychology and law. She has won substantial funding from the National Science Foundation, and was awarded a Fulbright U.S. Scholar fellowship to travel to Japan to research eyewitness memory distortion. 

As a leading scholar in her field, she has been an associate editor for Law & Human Behavior, published by the American Psychological Association, and she has been a leader of the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Williams College and her Ph.D. from Iowa State University.

We can look forward to hearing from her today.

Finally, at the end of the ceremony, Rob Benson, our multifaith chaplain—who is another new member of our community! Welcome, Rob!—will lead us in a benediction, after which we will march out, as we marched in, led by the mace bearer and our faculty marshals. There will then be a brief tree planting ceremony honoring those members of our community who have died during this past year; we will gather near the corner of College Street and Campus Avenue, in front of Gomes Chapel, just across the quad, for those who wish to join us for that.

* * *

I would like to take this opportunity to say just a few words about how I am thinking about Bates and the work we’re all doing here.

In her book Still Life, the novelist Louise Penny writes: “Life is change. If you aren’t growing and evolving, you’re standing still, and the rest of the world is surging ahead.”

I suspect that our newest students, in particular, have been hearing and thinking a lot about growth, and evolution, and their own personal development lately. The college years are prime time for these things! Everyone knows it, and everyone is likely in your ear about seizing opportunities, exploring new ideas, figuring out who you are and what matters to you. I admit it: If you were at the move-in day sendoff gathering, you know that I’m one of those people!

But in my defense: it’s true. It’s just plain and simply, true. So I wanted to talk to you a little more about the notion of evolution today—not as a scientist, there are plenty of others on this campus far more qualified to do that, but I want to talk about evolution from the perspective of someone who has studied and worked in a variety of institutions over many decades. And I want to reassure the students, first-years especially, that you’re not alone in this process of growth and change. AND that there is no single end goal—and importantly, no expectation of perfection.

Here’s the thing: Even as we exhort our students to use their time at Bates to be adventurous in their thinking, their ways of moving through the world, their sense of self—we are also, as an institution and a college community, engaged in a constant process of self-examination and evolution. 

Institutions evolve. We don’t stand still. We hit bumps in the road, and we make mistakes. Sometimes we get criticized, even publicly and painfully. But we reflect, we learn, and we improve. We have aspirations and ideals that we may not always reach—but we continue to grasp for. And it’s that grasping, that trying, not absolute perfection, that is our goal as an institution and our goal for you, our students. 

Let me quote another novelist here, Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead. In his debut novel The Intuitionist, he writes: “It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.”

As most of you know, the Bates community has been engaged in a comprehensive project of strategic planning, reflecting on who we are, where we are, and what we want to do and be in our next chapter—call it the next ten years. What are the next set of hills, metaphorically speaking, that we want to climb, together. Many of you here have been part of this work, and all of you will soon have the chance to weigh in on the draft plan. 

This has been a project of both reflection and ambition—assessing where we are, what we’ve achieved, and how we want to do more, and better, and different, moving forward. How we want to evolve, if you will.

The plan won’t be perfect. There are always more hills or different hills that could have been chosen.  We absolutely made choices, drawing on the work and wisdom of this community. And neither the articulation of our highest goals nor our realization of them will be perfect. But there will be effort and there will be growth—and these, not perfection, will be the point. 

And students, just as strategic planning is a team project of institutional evolution, there is a whole team around you as you experience your personal evolution during your time at Bates. There are faculty and staff who will put new ideas and possibilities in front of you, assist you in making sense of them, and then help you determine what paths you want to explore. There are the friends and floormates and teammates who are undergoing their own evolutions, and they can likewise offer perspective and possibility. Your evolution is your own. But you won’t be on your own as you pursue it. It’s actually one of the unique things about Bates, one of the things that makes us different from large research universities and even from many of our small college peers.

So let us all, then, launch this new academic year with evolution, not perfection, on our minds. We are immensely fortunate to live and work and play in the beautiful state of Maine, where the movement through the seasons remind us of the passage of time and of continual renewal. Let’s all try to embrace the changes around us, the changes within ourselves, and the changes we make together. And in all we do, let’s have grace for one another, and let’s never forget what a great day it is to be a Bobcat.

I will stop there and turn the mic over to my fellow speakers. But Class of 2030 and new transfer students, first I’m going to end, as has become my personal tradition, with four core words of advice I once received from my mom when I went off to college. As you launch into your Bates experience, just remember this: learn, care, share, and enjoy.

Now, please join me in welcoming first, your BCSG co-presidents, Ava and Mohammad, followed by Professor Amy Bradfield Douglass.