{"id":3069,"date":"2023-06-10T09:45:00","date_gmt":"2023-06-10T13:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/president\/?p=3069"},"modified":"2023-07-10T16:09:01","modified_gmt":"2023-07-10T20:09:01","slug":"address-at-the-annual-gathering-of-the-alumni-association","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/president\/2023\/06\/10\/address-at-the-annual-gathering-of-the-alumni-association\/","title":{"rendered":"Address at the Annual Gathering of the Alumni Association"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

President Clayton Spencer’s final public remarks as the college’s eighth president were at the Annual Gathering of the Alumni Association held during Reunion on June 10, 2023<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

George Colby Chase was the second president of Bates, serving for 25 years, from 1894 to 1919. He graduated from the college in 1869 and before becoming president, he was a professor of English here for 22 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to college lore, Chase was known as \u201cthe great builder.\u201d He oversaw the construction of 11 new buildings, including Coram Library, the Chapel, Carnegie Science Hall, and Chase Hall, posthumously named for him in 1919. I should add that President Chase tripled the number of students and faculty, and he managed tomanaged to quadruple the college\u2019s endowment from $259,000 to $1,135,000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is an impressive legacy by any standard. But I love George Colby Chase not because of the buildings he built or the \u201cthings\u201d he accomplished, but rather because of his vision of what a Bates education should be about. In his inaugural address, Chase wrote that the aim of the college should be to produce graduates whose \u201ceducation shall have prepared them to live in every chamber of their being, to be at home in the world as the world presents itself today, and to master\u2026the opportunities that the many-sided life of our age may offer.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This vision of the liberal arts as a deeply humanistic, yet powerfully adaptive and pragmatic, model of education is one of the things that inspired me when I dug in to learn about Bates as I prepared to come here as president in 2012.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The commitment to educate the whole person, head and heart, and in \u201cevery chamber of their being,\u201d and to prepare our students to engage the world as it \u201cpresents itself today\u201d spoke to me. This is noble and earnest work, and we all have benefited from the distinctive way we do this work at Bates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Working with students to figure out who they are, what they want to focus on, and how they wish to make a difference in the world, is certainly rewarding work, but it is also hard<\/em> work. Especially when the \u201cmany-sided life of our age\u201d gets up a head of steam and delivers a global pandemic that upends the world as we know it for the better part of three years. Or stokes a politics of fear and division that is magnified so destructively on college campuses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Precisely the generation we are meant to be educating is left to wonder what those of us who are supposedly in charge are doing to our planet, why we seem ready to tolerate the injustice and violence tearing at the fabric of our society, and how we have been so careless with resources and structures of opportunity that many of our students aren\u2019t sure that they can figure out a path to afford the basic elements of a good and stable life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But here\u2019s the good news. Our students are still curious. They are idealistic. They care about the world, they are developing their agency, and they want to gain the knowledge and tools to solve the world\u2019s hardest problems. They are generous and kind and open. And they are very funny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I still remember a trustee event where the ManOps \u2014 the all-male a cappella group, who were particularly good that year \u2014 were asked to provide the entertainment at a pre-dinner reception. When they got to their third song, they made an elaborate gesture of dedicating it to me and then proceeded to sing \u201cIt\u2019s Raining Men,\u201d with, I must say, very witty choreography. I was touched, of course, that the students were concerned about the tragic social life of the single lady president living one block behind \u201cparty central\u201d on Frye Street.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is pretty cool to have the opportunity to end this phase of my life as I began it \u2014 living on a liberal arts campus among a bunch of 18- to 22-year-olds at such an intense and dynamic time in their own development. The first time, I was a child living in the Davidson president\u2019s house in the ’60s, with my brother\u2019s rock band, complete with scraggly hair and ratty jeans, practicing in the garage behind the dorms. I was taking it all in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second time I was a student myself, at Williams, loving the intensity of the academic experience and taking the most arcane and theoretical courses I could find. Much more important, as it turns out, I was also making wonderful friends who Zoom together once a month to this day, 40-plus years later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This time I have been at Bates, rattling around a bit in the giant president\u2019s house, once again situated among brilliant, intense, and funny students \u2014 and the beer pong table permanently set up in the yard of the student house steps from my back door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My role has been different this time, and it has been rewarding even when it has been hard. But I love intensity, and some of the gnarlier problems that the \u201cmany-sided life of our age\u201d have batted up in these past few years have called forth a level of solidarity and trust among colleagues across campus that has made this period for me, and for many others I think, a deeply rewarding experience at the level of shared purpose and human connection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was growing up, I thought that the world was cleanly divided into \u201ckids\u201d and \u201cgrownups.\u201d I have a feeling that many of us might have seen the world this way. Anyway, you were a kid when you still lived in your house with your parents, the archetypal grownups; then you went to college and stuff happened during your four years there; and then you emerged, voila, fully adult and ready for the rest of your life. You can imagine my surprise when I was working at Harvard, years ago now, and I met a professor who couldn\u2019t wait to tell me about her course on adult development. \u201cAdult development,\u201d I said, is that actually a field?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am fond of quoting e.e. cummings\u2019 line that \u201cIt takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.\u201d What I hadn\u2019t realized, of course, before my bifurcated world of human development came crashing down, is that \u201cgrowing up to become who you really are\u201d is a lifelong project. And where better to carry out this project than a setting where preparing human beings for this journey is exactly the work at hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have heard college presidencies described as soul-sucking experiences, and I am sure some of them are. But my time at Bates has been a gift beyond price.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I recently heard an interview on NPR with Jason Segel, one of the creators and stars of the show Shrinking<\/em>, which has now finished its first season. It\u2019s about three psychiatrists in practice together whose dilemmas in their personal lives far outweigh the issues unfolding on the couches in their offices. When Segel was asked in the interview why he thought the show had gained such a following, he said something along the following lines: \u201cWe\u2019re not afraid of earnestness and we laugh our way through the really hard parts.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This strikes me as a great description of Bates, and it makes me proud and grateful to be associated with this fabulous college that you guys are lucky enough to claim as your own. If I\u2019ve learned one thing over the past eleven years, it is this: \u201cIt\u2019s always a great day to be a Bobcat.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President Clayton Spencer’s final public remarks as the college’s eighth president were…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":402,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":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":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-speeches-and-statements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/402"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3069"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3069\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3131,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3069\/revisions\/3131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/president\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}