Bowdoin Magazine, Vol. 94, No. 3, Spring/Summer 2023

Every word—and every silence—tells a story.

26 A Particular Kind of Strength

Meet Safa R. Zaki, psychologist and cognitive scientist, distinguished scholar and leader, accomplished cook and aspiring gardener—and Bowdoin’s sixteenth president.

24 Words Sent to My Friend

Nora Biette-Timmons ’14 reflects on the arrest of her classmate Evan Gershkovich and on risks to journalists around the globe.

32 Wired for Learning

Ian Ellis James ’74 (a.k.a. William Electric Black) uses lessons he learned at Sesame Street to spark knowledge in kids that just might save their lives.

42 Circling the Stories

Bowdoin professors Barbara Weiden Boyd and Marilyn Reizbaum discuss ways that classes they teach in different disciplines, set millennia apart, circle similar stories.

Forward

5 Ready Player: Aidan Carey ’24, an infielder for Bowdoin baseball, has an off-campus job that takes him to campuses all over: he’s a college hockey official.

7 Dine: Cizuka Seki ’99, who owns the DC-based Izakaya Seki with her father, shares a recipe for salmon (or tuna) tataki.

8 Talent Unleashed: Ariane Bailey ’00 and her three Australian shepherds—Skye, Jacob, and Finn—are stars on the show circuit and on stage and screen.

13 In Honor of Dreer: Kenneth I. Chenault ’73, H’96 and his wife, Kathryn, establish a fellowship named for the man who inspired Chenault’s history honors thesis.

23 Gateway to the North: The John and Lile Gibbons Center for Arctic Studies was dedicated on May 11, joining Barry Mills Hall in what the lead architect for the two buildings called “a gateway to the North.”

Q&A

50 The Art of Advising: Anita Heriot ’88 uses her knowledge of art and collecting to help collectors and investors acquire and sell art and other valuables.

Bowdoin’s two varsity men’s eights pass Howard Point on the New Meadows River early on the morning of April 27. In the left boat is coxswain Sydney Bonauto ’23, rowers Ben Conover ’26, Christoph Tatgenhorst ’23, Nicholas Werner ’24, Zubin Kenkare ’23, Beckett LaPrade ’26, Evan Albers ’23, Avery Ellis ’24, and Dan Bardsley ’23. In the right boat is coxswain Emily Jones ’25, Tommy Reynolds ’26, Kyle Hawley ’23, Charlie Ward, George Rowe ’23, Theo Curran ’23, Milo Goodell ’26, Zephyr Gilmore ’25, and Jack Fletcher ’26.

Photo by Douglas Welling

Ever Grateful

I want to let you know how much I appreciated the depth of Scott Hood’s thoughtful reporting as he interviewed Clayton Rose for this winter’s Bowdoin Magazine. That was quite a “portrait” he painted. As a ’91 alumna, I came away ever grateful for Clayton’s leadership at the College during such unprecedented times. In fact, I just wrote to our son’s head of school (an independent K-9 school) and shared Clayton’s comments on his leadership during COVID, specifically related to providing honesty, transparency, hope, and “a way home.” Our school head just had to write another letter reassuring the community—in the wake of the Nashville school shootings—and I felt Clayton’s perspective was spot-on as we continue to navigate the impermanence of certainty. Warm wishes from western Massachusetts.

Sira Berté ’91

TOO MANY ABRAMS

On the final page of the most recent Bowdoin alumni magazine (Winter 2023), you claim the elevation of Mount Abram (of the Mount Abram Ski Area) in Greenwood is 4,050 feet. Oh, if it were only so, but you are mistaken. That is the elevation of Mount Abraham (sometimes called Abram) in Kingfield, and it is definitely NOT ski-able (except, I suppose, by someone crazy enough to find a way to the trailhead in winter, hike up those 4,000+ feet, and ski the snowfields above the tree line). The much tamer Mt. Abram in Greenwood is a gentle 1,990 feet. Clearly a skier (or a hiker) did not proofread your copy. I am both.

Ruth Wyman Neagle ’76

CORRECTION

In the Spring/Summer 2022 issue, we listed the death date for Daniel S. Hayes ’81 as February 3, 2022. The correct date is February 4, 2022.

SEND US YOUR NEWS!

If there isn’t a class news entry for a class year, it’s because we didn’t receive any submissions for that year. We want to hear from you, and so do your classmates! Email classnews@bowdoin.edu or fill out a class news form on our website, bowdoin.edu/magazine.

MAGAZINE STAFF

Editor

Alison Bennie

Designer and Art Director

Melissa Wells

Managing Editor

Leanne Dech

Senior Editor

Doug Cook

Design Consultant 2Communiqué

Editorial Consultant

Laura J. Cole

Contributors

Jim Caton

John Cross

Cheryl Della Pietra

Rebecca Goldfine

Scott Hood

Janie Porche

Tom Porter

On the Cover: Illustration by Harriet Lee-Merrion

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE (ISSN: 0895-2604) is published three times a year by Bowdoin College, 4104 College Station, Brunswick, Maine, 04011. Printed by Penmor Lithographers, Lewiston, Maine. Sent free of charge to all Bowdoin alumni, parents of current and recent undergraduates, members of the senior class, faculty and staff, and members of the Association of Bowdoin Friends.

Opinions expressed in this magazine are those of the authors.

Please send address changes, ideas, or letters to the editor to the address above or by email to bowdoineditor@bowdoin.edu. Send class news to classnews@bowdoin.edu or to the address above.

READY PLAYER

I was drawn to Bowdoin by a few things: the campus and its integration into Brunswick, it feeling like home while being close to my real home in Boston, and a chance to play baseball as a Polar Bear—at least for my junior and senior years.

I and so many student-athletes lost playing time during the pandemic. I missed out on playing in both my senior year of high school and my first year of college. It was an extremely challenging time both as a student and an athlete.

I’ve always enjoyed spending time with my friends and teammates in my spare time. They really help to provide a break from the stresses of academics—I’m studying computer science and math in the hopes of becoming a software engineer, and I’m currently a teaching assistant. I’m so glad to have the social part of my life back; my favorite Bowdoin memories are easily nightly dinners with my baseball teammates at Thorne.

When I’m not in class, at practice, or hanging out with my teammates, you can likely find me officiating hockey games, which is something I got involved in during high school for the same reason that most people start their first jobs: to make some money. I figured having played hockey growing up and for Boston College High School, it would be a good way to stay in touch with a game I love and keep skating. Now that I’m no longer playing on a team myself, it’s nice to do the next best thing and be a ref. I started out officiating pee-wee games and moved surprisingly quickly into working Division I. Oddly enough, as I continue to mature as an official, I’ve discovered that I love the sport even more and want to continue to pursue it.

You could say that the pandemic forced me to get creative in learning remotely and training away from my team and campus. That was important for me because I always want to be improving myself—as an athlete, a student, and a person.

For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.

PHOTO: HEATHER PERRY

Aidan Carey, a double major in computer science and math and an infielder on the baseball team, has the type of on-campus job that takes him to all kinds of campuses—as a hockey official at the highest level outside of the NHL: Division I.

AIDAN CAREY ’24

FROM BOWDOIN AND BEYOND

Life

TREE TOPS

After nearly two years of work, Bowdoin’s sustainability team has achieved its long-held mission: to certify the College as an official Tree Campus with the Arbor Day Foundation’s higher education program. Sustainability fellow Maya Chandar Kouba ’23 collaborated with the Office of Sustainability and Bowdoin arborist Shawn

Gepfert to realize the goal. To be certified, Bowdoin had to meet five major criteria, including forming an advisory committee to oversee campus trees, developing a tree-care plan, and organizing a service-learning project. Every Tree Campus plan also needs updated goals and targets. Sustainability director Keisha Payson said the main objective for the first year is to hire a student—Dylan Petrillo ’26— to create a tree inventory of the entire campus. He’ll present his tree data at the end of the summer.

Good News for a Secretive Plant

FEDERAL REGULATORS have recently determined that the Furbish lousewort, named for Brunswick botanist Kate Furbish, is recovering in its northern habitat, so they have officially changed its status from endangered to threatened.

The lousewort, a rare flower that only grows in damp, shaded areas along a 140-mile section of the St. John River in Maine and Canada, has been teetering on the edge of survival for several decades. Since 1978, it has languished

on the federal list of endangered species (it was, in fact, one of the first plants to be added).

In this way, the secretive plant—which has only a single pollinator, the half-black bumblebee— managed to stop the construction of a massive hydroelectric dam project. The dam would have flooded 88,000 acres, including habitat for the lousewort, and Congress canceled the project in 1981.

The lousewort is also exceptional in another way: it is one of the few plants named for a woman. When Furbish, on one of her rigorous field expeditions across the state, discovered the flower growing along the riverbank in 1880, she recognized that no other Western scientist had yet identified it as a unique species.

She was pleased to accept a Harvard botanist’s suggested name in her honor, Pedicularis furbishiae, for, she wrote at the time, “I can find no plants named for a female botanist in your manual.” (The lousewort portion of the name comes from local people’s mistaken notion that the flower contained lice.)

Kate Furbish is beloved in Brunswick for her pioneering spirit and her elegant scientific illustrations (a local elementary school and a nature preserve are named for her). To document and collect specimens, she bucked decorum for women of her era and traveled throughout Maine by stagecoach, rail, boat, and foot. Many of the thousands of intricate, accurate, and beautiful drawings she made of plants and mushrooms are protected in the Bowdoin library’s archive. In 2016, the library partnered with Rowman & Littlefield to publish a complete two-volume edition of her artwork.

The recent reclassification of Furbish lousewort has sent ripples across Maine and through conservation organizations. “Though the Furbish lousewort is not completely out of danger, scientists say the reclassification is an encouraging sign that the rare plant is on the road to recovery,” the Portland Press Herald reported on May 9.

In a quote to the paper, conservation biologist Tierra Curry said, “As we fight the escalating extinction crisis, it’s important to celebrate conservation successes for all the little species that make up life on Earth.”

Campus

Pedicularis furbishiae, lousewort, from Maine Flora, 1871, by Kate Furbish.

Kate Furbish’s lousewort is endangered no more.

DID YOU KNOW?

A method of preparing fish or meat in Japanese cuisine is called tataki. The difference between tataki and sashimi is that sashimi is raw and cut in a very precise way, and tataki is marinated and seared so that the outside is cooked and the inside is raw.

Dine

Salmon Tataki

Recipe by Cizuka Seki ’99

Cizuka’s restaurant has several notes for us cooks: First, the cheapest sake is best for cooking. Second, shiso is an invasive plant, so you might be able to find it in all kinds of places, but if you can’t find it or if you want a substitute, you can use cilantro. Finally, this dish can be assembled and kept in the fridge well before serving, but don’t add the garlic chips until the last minute since they will get soggy.

½ cup soy sauce

½ head of garlic, peeled and thinly sliced, divided

1 teaspoon sugar, or more to taste

2 tablespoons mirin

2 tablespoons sake

3 tablespoons neutral oil or olive oil, divided

3 to 4 scallion stalks

3 to 4 shiso leaves

5 ounces fresh salmon (tuna is also great)

Combine the soy sauce, half the garlic, sugar, mirin, and sake in a small saucepan and bring to a boil, then reduce heat to very low and simmer for ten minutes, until the garlic has infused the soy sauce. Add more sugar if you like a slightly sweeter sauce. Add one tablespoon of the oil. Set aside to cool thoroughly.

Slice the scallions at an angle and place them in a bowl of ice water to crisp up for a few minutes, and then drain and dry them and set aside. Finely julienne the shiso by rolling the leaves into a tight cigar shape and slicing them as thinly as possible, then set aside. Add a tablespoon of the oil to a sauté pan that is large enough to hold the salmon, then heat until shimmering. Add the other half of the garlic and sauté until nicely browned, being careful not to burn the slices. Remove the garlic slices from the oil and drain them on a paper towel. Return the pan to the heat.

Brush the salmon with the remaining olive oil, add it to the hot pan, and sear the salmon on all sides. The sear does not need to be a hard sear or browned significantly. Remove the pan from the heat.

To assemble, slice the salmon against the grain into bite-size pieces, ensuring that each piece has some sear and some raw center. Fan the slices of salmon out on a plate. Whisk the sauce to make sure the oil is well incorporated, drizzle the sauce over the salmon, and scatter the scallion, shiso, and garlic chips on top of the dish and serve.

Cizuka Seki ’99 owns Izakaya Seki in Washington, DC, with her father. Since opening in 2012, the restaurant has been as high as #7 and lowest at #22 in The Washington Post’s “Fall Dining Guide” and was most recently included in The New York Times’ “2022’s Top Restaurant Dishes” for a mushroom dish.

Did You Know?

Agility work combines running, jumping, climbing, and weaving— all at top speed—and many different breeds can fly around the course. Dogs love doing it, and they love the rewards, like playing with a special toy. Or getting a meatball!

Forward Talent Unleashed

Trainer Ariane Bailey ’00 and her three Australian shepherds are star teams on set and in the ring.

Illustration by Romy Blümel

Ariane Bailey ’00 grew up in rural Maine with dogs and other companion and farm animals. In her post-Bowdoin years of apartment living, she could only have cats, but as soon as she bought a house, she began looking for a dog to adopt. She fell in love with Jacob, an Australian shepherd who is now thirteen, as soon as she saw his puppy photo on Petfinder. Initially a timid little guy, he blossomed with training into a confident dog who has, Ariane says, “an excellent sense of humor.” Their partnership inspired her to become a professional dog training instructor and to enter the world of competitive dog sports and performing. Two years after rescuing Jacob, she got Skye from a New England breeder, and Skye joined Jacob in agility, disc, obedience, and scent work, both dogs winning multiple championships, working as models, and performing together at fairs, festivals, and events. Skye has appeared in television roles and starred in Netflix’s The Noel Diary with Justin Hartley and Barrett Doss. Finn, who is three and from the same bloodline as Skye, is Ariane’s newest dog. “His career is just starting,” Ariane says, but he is already competing and has appeared in two commercials and has performed live.

Starting out, both the human and the dog are learning—the human to communicate with cues and the dog how to read them. Dogs also have to be exposed to different environments with different things to see and hear so they learn to perform in distracting situations.

For some dogs, learning to stay at the start while their handler walks onto the course is really tough. For others, learning to stop on or go through the three contact obstacles (A-Frame, Dogwalk, and Teeter) is the most difficult. For some dogs, it’s the weave poles. And then there are those pups who struggle to ignore the judge.

Herding and sporting dogs— Australian shepherds, border collies, shelties, Labradors, golden retrievers, etc.—have been bred for generations to be biddable and to want to work (originally with shepherds, ranchers, or hunters), and they also tend to be athletic.

When he was looking for an Australian shepherd for the movie The Noel Diary, director Charles Shyer called Berloni, who told him he knew an Aussie trainer skilled enough: Ariane. Charles fell in love with Skye, and Ariane—who in her day job is an attorney—worked with Skye at night and on the weekends to prepare her to be a star.

Ariane and her dogs perform disc dog freestyle routines at fairs and festivals, where the dogs catch the discs in a performance set to music.

Working on set is fun but hard, Ariane says. Both trainer and dog need to be able to adjust on the fly when the director suddenly wants something different. No matter what the script calls for, the hardest thing is getting the animal to look natural and not look off camera.

Animal trainer and agent Bill Berloni was looking for local teams to perform on stage with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra in a production called “Playing with Dogs” in 2017. Three people gave him Ariane’s name, and her dogs ended up being among those performing in the show.

Some of the skills Ariane has had to train her dogs to do on cue are expected: bark, walk or play with an actor, sleep, and go to the door to greet someone. But they have also had to pop their head up over a wall, run and leap over stuff, sit on a bench and pretend to watch a movie, back up and knock over a barstool, and even eat soup.

Lessons in Investing

Last fall, George Schultz ’05 and Pei Huang ’08 co-taught a course called Mental Models: Unconventional Idea Discovery at Columbia Business School. The course, which is part of the business school’s value investing program, teaches students to look for patterns, similarities, and lessons in historical case studies and to use them to generate unconventional ideas for future investing. As part of the curriculum, Schultz, who is an investor at Whale Rock Capital Management in Boston, and Huang, who is an investor with Eminence Capital in New York, shared lessons from their own past investments in public companies across a variety of industries. The nine students pitched their final project ideas to other current investors.

“It says a lot, in my opinion, that two Bowdoin students co-taught this type of class,” says Schultz. “This is what a liberal arts education and Bowdoin in particular is all about—learning to think for yourself and learning to reason.”

Taking Flight

Biologist’s two-minute nature video on building a bird’s nest goes viral.

IN 2018, biology professor Nat Wheelwright—the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Natural Sciences Emeritus—put out a fun two-minute video on how to build a bird’s nest. Five years later, it has accrued more than 250,000 views across the globe.

The YouTube clip was part of a weekly series called Nature Moments, made over the course of a year, presented by Wheelwright and produced with assistance from colleagues on the Bowdoin staff. The videos, showcasing the natural history of common animals and plants throughout the changing seasons, were all shot in Wheelwright’s Brunswick backyard.

The bird’s nest episode, in which he examines the discarded home of a black-throated green warbler, has been seen in nearly every corner of the world. “Just like human houses,” observes Wheelwright, “the materials birds use have to provide a solid structure to hold their young, plus insulation to keep them warm, but unlike our homes, their nests need to be hidden from predators.”

PHOTOS: (HUANG AND SCHULTZ) COURTESY GEORGE SCHULTZ; (WARBLER) THOMAS R. HISSONG

From left: Pei Huang ’08 and George Schultz ’05

Add to the number of viewers by watching the video at bowdo.in/birdsnest.

Nature

Black-throated green warbler

Transition

A FUN FAREWELL

A small dinner in honor of retiring president Clayton Rose and Julianne Rose was held May 12, 2023, at the Schiller Coastal Studies Center, where Clayton’s senior colleagues celebrated the outgoing president and joked about his initial reluctance to sit for a presidential portrait. Trustees and senior officers presented the Roses with a gift of a painting by A. LeRoy Greason Professor of Art Mark Wethli, who is also retiring from the College at the end of this academic year.

PHOTO: FRED FIELD

Clockwise, from front: Joan Benoit Samuelson ’79, P’12, H’22, President-elect Safa Zaki, President Clayton Rose, and Julianne Rose at the dinner in the Roses’ honor.

Campus Life Would I Lie to You?

Who owns a competitive racing pigeon? Who has an irrational fear of sparkling water? Who has outrun a bear on a hike? And who hasn’t?

Successfully separating fact from fiction is the name of the game in “Would I Lie to You?”—the wildly entertaining Jack Magee’s Pub event fashioned after the popular BBC game show of the same name and abbreviated by the Brits as WILTY. Bowdoin’s version served up contestants who included professors, coaches, Res Life staff, and even President Clayton Rose for a head-to-head contest of ultimate bluffing. Each participant scripted two true stories of their own—just one or two sentences long—and was also provided a mix of other true tales that had been collected from the community. The challenge for panelists was to convincingly sell their anecdotes to the audience of students gathered in teams of two to six people.

After asking a few probing questions to try to suss out who was lying and who was telling the truth, student teams gained a point for correctly guessing when a statement was true, with Gelato Fiasco gift cards hanging in the balance for those most successful at figuring out the fibs. Organizers in student activities say everyone involved in the game enjoyed it so much that they hope “Would I Lie to You” might reveal itself again next year.

Game On

NESCAC CHAMPIONS

Capturing its first conference title in nine years, the seventh-seeded men’s hockey team completed an impressive and improbable run through the NESCAC Tournament with a 3–2 overtime win over Williams College. It is the third NESCAC championship for Bowdoin, which previously won back-to-back championships in 2013—when they also defeated Williams in the championship game—and 2014. On top of bragging rights over this year’s title, the Polar Bears became the first seventh-seed team in conference history to win the league title. With the win, Ben Guite, in his first year as a head coach, joins Bowdoin graduate Dave Cataruzolo ’98 (Trinity in 2008) as the only two rookie coaches to win the NESCAC championship.

ILLUSTRATION: JAMES STEINBERG; PHOTO: COURTESY AMHERST COLLEGE

Bobby Pearl ’23 reacts after scoring the winning goal.

In Honor of Dreer

Chenault gift establishes the new Herman S. Dreer Fellowship to bring exemplary leaders to engage with the Bowdoin community.

KENNETH I. CHENAULT ’73, H’96 and his wife, Kathryn C. Chenault, have made a $2 million gift to Bowdoin College, the bulk of which will be used to establish a fellowship in honor of Herman S. Dreer, Class of 1910, the second Black man to graduate from Bowdoin, eightyfour years after John Brown Russwurm, Class of 1826. Dreer’s life story—and, in particular, his relationship with the College—is revealed in “The Blackman at Bowdoin,” the history honors thesis Chenault wrote in 1973.

Dreer graduated in just three years as the second-highest-ranked student in his class. Even so, he was isolated socially because of his race. In his honors thesis, Chenault wrote that “The fact that he was left alone and not intimidated physically by his classmates was all he could expect or ask for. ... Slavery may have ended, but Dreer was tolerated for the most part rather than accepted socially, just as Russwurm had been eighty-one years earlier.”

Despite the significant racism Dreer experienced, he led a remarkable life as an academic, educational reformer, author, minister, and civil rights leader. Chenault wrote that Dreer had “a lifelong mission: helping Black people in any way he possibly could, be it educating them, tending to their spiritual needs, or as he did in November of 1972, engaging in a fierce political struggle to help Blacks gain elective office in St. Louis.” Along with historian Carter G. Woodson, Dreer initiated the observance of Black History Month in the United States.

“I stand on the shoulders of people like Herman Dreer who, despite being denied the opportunities they deserved, paved the way and valiantly forged ahead,” said Ken Chenault. “Kathy and I are privileged to honor Herman Dreer and give him the long-overdue recognition that he so justly deserves. The Herman S. Dreer Leadership Fellowship will ensure that Herman’s legacy lives on to inspire future generations of trailblazers.”

The Herman S. Dreer Leadership Fellowship will seek fellows from across society, including leaders who rose from similar underresourced backgrounds as Dreer. It will support individuals from any professional field—leaders “from all walks of life”—in business, technology, government, law, the arts, the military, the nonprofit sector, and other disciplines.

Dreer Fellows will be named for a semester or an academic year, with the general expectation that they will visit campus several times, deliver a public lecture, and engage with students and the greater Bowdoin community, both inside and outside the classroom.

Passions

Curtains Up

Sheldon Stone ’74 grew up in New Jersey, the son of parents who took him to see shows on Broadway almost weekly. A first-generation college student and a government major, he went on to earn an MBA at Columbia and then to a career in finance, but he never lost his love of theater and has become a coproducer for many shows.

His latest investment is a thirtieth anniversary revival of the rock musical The Who’s Tommy, which Who founding member Pete Townshend is adapting from the 1993 production. It will premiere in June at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago.

Asked what makes him invest his money in this way, Stone says, “It’s not my livelihood. But there’s something magical when you’re sitting there, and the curtain rises. I still love it.”

PHOTO: GEORGE J. MITCHELL DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL

& ARCHIVES

Above: Kenneth I. Chenault (right) presents Dr. Herman S. Dreer with the Afro-American Society’s first Outstanding Alumnus Award at Bowdoin College in 1973.

Academics

Bumper Crop

The winter growing season yielded a bountiful crop of sugar kelp harvested from the Schiller Coastal Studies Center’s educational kelp farm in Harpswell Sound. Greta Bolinger ’23, a biology major and earth and oceanographic science minor pursuing an independent research project with the farm, seeded her experimental kelp farm in the fall. Bolinger says that, over the course of five months, the kelp grew up to ten feet in length, averaging a growth rate of one centimeter per day. The fast growth and its timing make kelp a fascinating prospect for a number of interested parties, including aquaculturists and researchers looking for ways to increase the value of kelp by finding uses in nutraceuticals and other products. Because kelp grows between October and May, it’s a potential source of off-season income for those otherwise fishing commercially for lobster or other seafood and a way to diversify Maine’s blue economy. Additionally, kelp does a great job capturing carbon dioxide and helping keep waters clean. “My research project investigated optimal light conditions for growing highly nutritional kelp in coastal, estuarine waters,” says Bolinger. “I also grew kelp under the same conditions in a laboratory setting, which showed consistency with results from my kelp farm, confirming my suspicion that kelp farms offer tremendous potential as venues for scientific research.” Bolinger gave her truckload of sugar kelp to Bowdoin students, staff, and Growing to Give, a local organic farm.

Greta Bolinger ’23 (left) and Sophia Adami-Sampson ’23 hang sugar kelp to dry on the rafters of a greenhouse at Growing to Give, an organic farm in Brunswick that uses the kelp as a nutrient-rich additive to its fertilizer mixture.

DIFFERENT PATHS

Bowdoin’s recent policy of accepting transfer credits from community colleges is expanding access and representation among our student body to include more veterans as well as students older than the eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds who traditionally make up campus.

DANIEL HENNELLY ’26

“There are a lot of similarities between the military and college,” says Daniel Hennelly, thirty-four, who served eight years in the US Marine Corps. “A small campus and a military base are the same thing. They provide your housing, your food, your community.” Hennelly transferred to Bowdoin from Houston Community College after participating at Harvard in the Warrior-Scholar Project, which offers academic boot camps for veterans, and will graduate from Bowdoin debt-free thanks to Bowdoin’s Marine Corps Scholarship funded by alumni.

ALEXIS BLAKES ’25

After four and a half years in the Army and another four working in IT for Amazon Web Services, Alexis Blakes, twenty-seven, hit a wall. “The work I wanted to do required experience in research, and there was no opportunity to do that at the time,” she says of her decision to pursue a fouryear degree. Like Hennelly, Blake completed the Warrior-Scholar Project at MIT, where she learned about Bowdoin. She transferred from Columbia Basin College in Pasco, Washington.

BERENICE FLORES ’25

“I’ve lived many lives,” says Berenice Flores, who sang in a cover band, performed stand-up comedy, and sold real estate and cars, before continuing her education. Forty-one, she transferred from Normandale Community College in Bloomington, Minnesota, where she developed a passion for writing. “The benefit of being older is knowing yourself and what you need.”

Bowdoin in the House

TWO ALUMNI who have attracted a lot of attention recently for leadership in their respective fields found themselves in the White House on the same day.

Justin J. Pearson ’17, one of the “Tennessee three” expelled from the Tennessee State House over a gun control protest and later reinstated, and Matthew Bernstein ’13, Maine’s 2023 Teacher of the Year, both spent time at the White House on Monday, April 24, 2023, although in separate meetings.

Just weeks after their historic expulsion sparked national outrage, Pearson and fellow Tennessee House representatives Justin Jones and Gloria Johnson met in the Oval Office with President Biden and Vice President Harris to discuss how to move gun reform legislation forward.

“You’re standing up for our kids; you’re standing up for our communities,” said President Biden during their meeting.

That same day, Bernstein, a ninth-grade humanities and social studies teacher at Casco Bay High School in Portland, joined other state Teachers of the Year for a ceremony during which they were honored by President Joe Biden, First Lady Jill Biden, and US Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. Bernstein, who participated in the Bowdoin Teacher Scholars program, was named Maine’s Teacher of the Year in October 2022.

Academics

Invited to Inspire

IN 1972, a group of Bowdoin faculty and students channeled their alarm over the state of the environment into founding a new academic discipline that would not only teach environmental issues but train students to bring about change.

Today, the environmental studies coordinate major is one of Bowdoin’s most popular. To celebrate fifty years since its inception, fourteen graduates were invited to campus for a two-day symposium in April to discuss their work related to climate and sustainability, environmental design and planning, and storytelling.

“Their collective expertise and wisdom helps us think about how we need to change and evolve to best prepare our students to navigate the environmental problems of today and the future,” said Professor of History and Environmental Studies Connie Chiang.

Teona Williams ’12, assistant professor of geography at Rutgers University, gave the keynote talk. An environmental justice scholar and

Black feminist historian, she spoke about the imperative of integrating environmental activism with social justice. Environmental studies must, she said, “center the needs and well-being of those most vulnerable, because if you help the most marginalized you will, by extension, help everyone.”

The storytelling panel included writers, journalists, and a podcaster: Erica Berry ’14, Emily Guerin ’09, Nat Herz ’09, and Corbin Hiar ’05. One theme discussed was the historical inaccessibility of the field, and how to encourage storytellers from diverse backgrounds to share a broader narrative.

Speaking on climate change were five panelists whose work spans the globe from Boston to Bangkok: Brooks Winner ’10, Payton Deeks ’10, Heather Berman ’18, Greg Goldsmith ’05, and Alison Flint ’05. Though they work with a range of institutions—from public agencies to private business and nonprofit organizations—they share the task of mitigating climate change and helping communities adapt.

The environmental design panel, moderated by senior lecturer in environmental studies Jill Pearlman, included urban planner Grace Cho ’05, coastal resilience expert Sam Brody ’92, US DOT environmental protection specialist Symone Howard ’15, and public landscape architect Adrienne Heflich ’05.

“We emphasize the importance of interdisciplinary breadth—the ability to think across and even beyond disciplines—coupled with disciplinary depth,” said Chiang. “Our hope is that students can bring their disciplinary expertise to the table while also being able to ask informed questions and engage in productive conversations with people in other fields.”

Read more and watch the keynote speech by Teona Williams ’12 at bowdo.in/ES50.

History

Commencement Dinner, Eighties Style

Seniors and families enjoy a post-Baccalaureate lobster bake with alternatives for everyone, including charbroiled sirloin steak, citrus garlic chicken, and grilled eggplant and tofu. In the pandemic years, the lunch after Commencement became what Dining calls BYOB(L), for build your own bag lunch, with grilled chicken and roasted vegetable sandwiches and lemon chickpea and quinoa salad. It proved so popular and efficient that Dining has kept the model. When the New York Public Library was scanning old menus, author Michael Cannell P’21, who has a writing desk there, noticed one from Bowdoin. The 1880 “bill of fare” for Commencement dinner included boiled ham, tongue, and corned beef. If you were feeling more of a steamed vibe, you could have plain lobster. Eager to please any palate even then, they served chicken and turkey roasts, salmon, and lobster or chicken salad. If you wanted a dipping sauce, caterer W.R. Field had you and your entrée covered, from walnut ketchup to gooseberry sauce. The big finish included four kinds of pie, three flavors of ice cream, English walnuts, figs, and what is mystifyingly listed as mixed fancy cake. No matter the menu, Bowdoin always cooks up a satisfying send-off.

Fourteen alumni doing exceptional work for the environment returned to Bowdoin in mid-April to commemorate the Environmental Studies Program’s fiftieth anniversary.

On Stage

SHAKESPEARE ON THE STEPS

On May 6, Masque and Gown staged a play on the terrace of the Walker Art Building, in a very old Bowdoin tradition of Shakespeare on the steps that hasn’t happened in a while. Ymir St. George ’26 plays Malvolio here in the informal outdoor production of Twelfth Night, directed by Francesca Kusserow ’24, a classics major who did theater for the first time last year, when she was in the Masque and Gown production of Much Ado about Nothing In addition to directing, Kusserow served as the artistic director and costume designer, and she was aided by two stage managers. “Shakespeare’s plays are six hundred years old,” she says, “but they are timeless.” The cast of fourteen actors “was so wonderful, so dedicated,” Kusserow added. “They just made it so beautiful.” The weather was warm and sunny the day of the performance, and a crowd of students, faculty, staff, and members of the Brunswick community showed up on the Quad to enjoy the show.

PHOTO: FRED FIELD

First-year student Ymir St. George in the role of Malvolio.

By the Numbers

Dialed In

College radio stations play a soundtrack to such impressionable years that it’s no wonder they occupy an especially nostalgic place in our hearts. WBOR spent its own formative years redefining itself, evolving in the 1940s and ’50s from BOTA and then WBOA (both for Bowdoin on the air) on the AM dial to the call sign it has had since 1957 (for Bowdoin on the radio), when WBOR’s inaugural FM broadcast could first be heard across campus. Previously, the station could only be picked up in first-year dorms within a few hundred feet of the station, which was then in Moulton Union but has been in the basement of the former Dudley Coe Health Center since 1995. WBOR has played host to decades of memorable moments musical and otherwise, perhaps most notably during the sixties. In March 1960, the station recorded a Pete Seeger concert at Pickard Theater. The Smithsonian Institution would later release the entire recording in a two-CD set and on streaming platforms. In May 1964, the station recorded a speech given by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the First Parish Church, and in October 1969, WBOR broadcast all-day coverage of Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam activities. Recently, the station received a gift from Bob Lochte ’72, who remembers fondly his involvement with WBOR and went on to work in radio and television for thirty years, becoming an ardent supporter of nonprofit radio. The station plans to use his contribution to update its equipment.

$4,000

DJs from the greater Brunswick community.

Shows per week.

Number of hours of playlists during the height of COVID-19, when many students were studying remotely—necessary to maintain the station’s FCC license and work within the College’s pandemic rules.

Gift from the Class of 1924 that helped create space in Moulton Union for an AM radio station to house WBOR’s predecessor, BOTA.

Watt signal, allowing WBOR to be heard throughout the midcoast area.

Student DJs.

Number on the FM dial (if you live locally) or stream live at wbor.org.

Gift from Bob Lochte ’72 to be used for equipment upgrades.

$13,000

Moreover, the Moon

AVANT-GARDE WRITER AND ARTIST Mina Loy helped introduce Italian Futurism to America, radicalize the aspirations of feminism, expand the aesthetics of Surrealism, and presage American Pop art, and she was admired by contemporaries ranging from Marcel Duchamp to Ezra Pound. But upon her death in 1966, she had largely been forgotten.

Today, her writing is well-known within literary circles thanks to scholarship by Roger Conover ’72, a biography by Carolyn Burke, and a recent study by Mary Ann Caws. And now through September 17, 2023, visitors to the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA) can view the first comprehensive exhibition of her visual work, Mina Loy: Strangeness Is Inevitable, which contains more than sixty pieces by Loy, complemented by selected works by her friends and associates.

“Loy is sometimes difficult to categorize and has come in recent years to be celebrated for her free verse poetry, yet she was also a prolific and immensely creative visual artist,” says Anne Collins Goodyear, codirector of the BCMA. “Through her visual art, designs, poetry, letters, photographs, inventions, and patents, visitors will be introduced to the pioneering work of this bold and revolutionary woman, whose important influence is perhaps even more obvious today than it was during her own lifetime.”

CALLING IT: A CAREER

After more than forty years behind the microphone, twenty-four of them calling Boston Bruins games, broadcaster Dale Arnold ’79, P’07 announced his retirement in April. Arnold is the only person ever to have called play-by-play for five Boston professional teams— Bruins, Celtics, Patriots, Red Sox, and Revolution, the Major League Soccer franchise. Pressed for a standout moment, Arnold recalls a Red Sox-Tampa Bay Rays game in June 2011. “Josh Beckett threw the greatest one-hitter in baseball history that no one in Boston will ever remember,” he recalls. “The engineers at Tropicana Field arranged for me to get a second television feed in the press box because the Bruins were also playing game seven of the Stanley Cup Final in Vancouver against the Canucks. As soon as the Red Sox game ended, we rushed to the clubhouse, and the entire team was watching the Bruins on television. When the second period ended, the team piled on the buses and raced back to the hotel, and I watched the Bruins win the Stanley Cup along with the entire Red Sox team in a closed-off lobby bar at the hotel.” Back in Maine, Arnold is looking forward to writing, his self-described “side hustle.” His third book, The Tough Guys, is due out in November.

A new exhibition featuring never-before-seen archival material represents the first retrospective of poet and artist Mina Loy.

Alumni Life

Dale Arnold in the broadcast booth in 1998.

ILLUSTRATION: JING JING TSONG; PHOTOS: (MINA LOY) BRAD STANTON; (ARNOLD) JUDY ROLFE

State of Maine, State of Mind: Volume II

THEODORE A. PERRY ’60

(State of Maine State of Mind Publishing, 2021)

In his second volume of Maine stories, Ted Perry continues and expands on his earlier collection, State of Maine State of Mind: Upcountry Humor and Stories. As in the original volume, the book offers a conversation with Huck Colby, a common old-timer from Maine and a master of dry humor. After Bowdoin, Perry earned his master’s and PhD at Yale and has published many books on literature and philosophy. He has taught at Williams, Smith, the University of Connecticut, Loyola University, Hebrew University, and Ben Gurion University.

Athletics

Hitting It Out of the Park

Following a record-breaking senior campaign, Bowdoin softball star Angelina Mayers ’23 became the first All-American in program history and just the second to be named the New England Small College Athletic Conference Softball Player of the Year.

The senior led NESCAC in on-base percentage (.419), slugging percentage (1.335), and runs batted in (48), was tied for a conference-high with fourteen home runs, setting a Polar Bear single-season record, and ranked second in the league in runs scored (45). Mayers recorded a team-high fifty-one hits and finished the year hitting .412 and slugging .843.

Mayers, who joined Julia Geaumont ’15 to become the only two Bowdoin players to earn conference player of the year, was also recognized as co-recipient of the Lucy L. Shulman Outstanding Female Athlete Award, sharing it with All-American swimmer (and roommate) Anna Roberts ’23.

Now These Three Remain

SARAH DICKENSON

SNYDER ’77

(Lily Press, 2023)

Burden of Command

GEORGE A. SMITH ’63

(G. A. Smith, 2019)

Excursions in Number Theory, Algebra, and Analysis

ALBERT CUOCO G’74 (Springer, 2022)

Undue Hate

Associate Professor of Economics

DANIEL F. STONE (MIT Press, 2023)

Angelina Mayers ’23

A DATE FOR MAKING HISTORY

The inauguration of Safa Zaki, Bowdoin’s sixteenth president and the first woman to hold that post, will be held during Homecoming Weekend, October 13–15, 2023. Currently dean of faculty at Williams College, where she has been a member of the faculty for nearly two decades, Zaki is an accomplished scholar, educator, and leader. Read more about her in the story in this issue, page 26. Information about the event and how to stream it live will be forthcoming.

Leaders

Classmates Twice Over

And the envelope goes to—three outstanding seniors who’ve been down that road before.

AT THE PRESIDENT’S AWARD LUNCHEON at the end of the academic year, three prize winners found themselves in familiar company. Margot Ngo ’23, recipient of the Michael F. Micciche III Award, given to the student who “embodies the entire Bowdoin experience” by engaging the College community, achieving academic excellence, and earning the respect of their peers and professors; Souleman Toure ’23, winner of this year’s Andrew Allison Haldane Cup, recognizing outstanding qualities of leadership and character; and Zoë Wilson ’23, who as winner of the DeAlva Stanwood Alexander Second Prize was an alternate student Commencement speaker, all attended the same school before coming to Bowdoin. Ngo, Toure, and Wilson went to The Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut. Another small-world connection with Hotchkiss: Craig W. Bradley, head of school, was Bowdoin’s dean of student affairs from 1996 to 2006.

PHOTO: MICHELE STAPLETON

Save

“This building is really a testament to what Bowdoin is all about. It’s about ingenuity, it’s about being innovative, it’s about taking risk, it’s about being sustainable.

That’s what the College is about.”

—BARRY MILLS ’72, H’15, BOWDOIN’S FOURTEENTH PRESIDENT, ON APRIL 20, 2023, DURING THE DEDICATION OF BARRY MILLS HALL, MAINE’S FIRST COMMERCIAL STRUCTURE, ALONG WITH THE JOHN AND LILE GIBBONS CENTER FOR ARCTIC STUDIES, TO USE MASS TIMBER.

From left: Margot Ngo ’23, Souleman Toure ’23, and Zoë Wilson ’23

Mildred’s Flowers

generations.

AMONG THE FIRST flowers to bloom every spring, daffodils often symbolize the end of winter. One bunch at the Schiller Coastal Studies Center also serves as an annual reminder for Joe Tourtelotte of his grandmother Mildred.

Shortly after Tourtelotte became the full-time caretaker of the 113-acre center in 2015, his grandfather died, and Mildred was moved into an assisted living facility. While tending her flower garden in Bowdoinham— where the family has lived for several generations—he found himself with an excess of bulbs and decided to plant a couple dozen of them beside the Thalheimer Farmhouse.

“She has sadly passed away since, and it means something to have this small piece of her out here and be reminded of her when I see them blooming,” Tourtelotte says. “She was a sweet, kind woman who taught me a lot of values growing up. The daffodils have more than doubled in the past seven years, and I hope they continue to multiply and are enjoyed for many years to come!”

Student Life

Crowning Achievement

Off the top of his head, Tej Dhingra ’25 can tell you all about the opportunities he sees to fill a functional need. Worn by Sikhs, followers of the fifth-largest religion in the world, turbans are generally made of 100 percent cotton, making them uncomfortable to wear when exercising, playing sports, or in warm climates. Dhingra says he “caught the entrepreneurship bug” while on a CXD-funded internship at a venture capital accelerator and was inspired to launch TAJ, which means “crown” in Punjabi, to create lightweight, breathable turbans designed for physical activity. “I view TAJ as a form of compassionate innovation,” he says. “It’s creating a product for a minority group that has been consistently overlooked in America.” Dhingra was accepted into the Sikh American Legal Defense Fund Innovation Fellows program, through which he was able to continue building his startup with the support of a large Sikh network, and his pitch was selected as the winner of the 2022 SikhLEAD Innovation Startup Competition.

A field of daffodils at the Schiller Coastal Studies Center connects

Daffodils planted by Joe Tourtelotte bloom in front of the farmhouse at Schiller.

Tej Dhingra ’25

Campus Life

GATEWAY TO THE NORTH

President Clayton Rose presided over the recent dedication ceremonies of two new campus buildings— Barry Mills Hall on April 20 and the John and Lile Gibbons Center for Arctic Studies on May 11.

The two contemporary structures—just feet apart and joined by a landscaped terrace— form a striking “gateway to the north,” described head architect of the project, design principal Nat Madson of HGA. The buildings are constructed of mass timber and cross-laminated timber panels, which are generating excitement for their potential to revitalize the Maine lumber industry and usher in a more ecological material for commercial buildings.

The two buildings will also propel the advancement of the academic disciplines they house. Barry Mills Hall is the new home of the Department of Anthropology and the Digital and Computational Studies Program. It includes a sixty-person cinema classroom, four classrooms, twelve offices, meeting spaces, and a large event and catering space.

The Gibbons Center for Arctic Studies contains exhibit spaces, archaeology research and teaching labs, a classroom, and offices for museum staff. “Today we have a proper home for our Arctic collection, both for storage and exhibition, as well as a state-of-the-art space to bring in exhibitions from other museums,” Rose said at its opening. “We now have an opportunity to be one of the handful of go-to destinations for exhibitions centered on Arctic issues.”

PHOTO: FRED FIELD

The new John and Lile Gibbons Center for Arctic Studies opened to the public on May 30, 2023.

Words Sent to My Friend

Nora Biette-Timmons ’14 reflects on the arrest of her classmate Evan Gershkovich and on risks to journalists around the globe.

“IT’S OKAY. I’m sad and sleepless but holding on,” Evan wrote to me on March 13, 2022. I’d messaged him on Twitter to ask how he was holding up following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—and to congratulate him on his new gig as Russia correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. The actual invasion had happened a few weeks previously, but I waited a bit to be in touch; I hadn’t wanted to bombard him in the midst of an already overwhelming moment. As I wrote to Evan in my message, I “figured everyone you’ve ever spoken to has been messaging.”

A year later, on March 29, Evan was arrested by the FSB, the Soviet successor organization to the KGB, while reporting in Yekaterinburg, a large Russian city east of the Ural Mountains, and our brief exchange last year feels eerily prescient now, as he sits in a Russian prison cell—physically OK, most importantly, holding on, likely occasionally sad and sleepless, receiving hundreds of letters from everyone he’s ever spoken to, and then some. That’s because, almost immediately, his friends from Moscow figured out a way to get letters to him in Lefortovo prison. The email address (freegershkovich@gmail.com) through which letters are sent to be translated and transcribed has frequently been shared by major media outlets, resulting in hundreds, if not thousands, of missives from strangers.

“On the actual day The Atlantic wrote about it, there were 592 emails,” Polina Ivanova, a Russia correspondent for the Financial Times, told me. She and Evan became fast friends in Moscow when they met a few years ago, and now she manages the email inbox, along with another journalist friend, a process she called “totally hectic.”

“We have it set up on our phones,” she said, and in the first three weeks after Evan’s arrest, she would get “a notification every five minutes.”

As of early May, roughly 1,600 individuals had written Evan emails, Ivanova said, and about 350 of those “are connected to Evan in some way”—friends, parents of friends, colleagues, other journalists. Some people write to him nearly every day, and Polina has been able to have multiple back-and-forths with him.

“He wrote in his first letter back that he has read the stories of political prisoners in the past who have said how much joy it brings them to read letters, but it’s a next-level happiness to receive those letters yourself,” she added, “which I thought was very poignant.”

I met Evan sometime in the fall of 2010, when we were first-year students. I don’t recall the moment we met, but then, suddenly, somewhere in that first semester, he appears in my memories. As plans for sophomore year housing fell into place, a group of our friends managed to stage a (ResLife-sanctioned) takeover of Ladd House, and the next fall, Evan and I were next-door neighbors, tucked away on an alcove hallway with two other friends and a shared shower. We remained close through college, and then our friendship took on new dynamics as we entered the world of professional

journalism, trying to navigate the industry and commiserating over the evergreen uncertainties of early careers.

Now Evan, who had been accredited by the Russian government to work as a journalist, has been charged with “espionage,” which his editors at the Journal and the American government have repeatedly called baseless (and which I, as his friend of well over a decade, feel very confident calling utterly bogus). Rather, his arrest and the charges represent Russian president Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on dissent and on anything that falls outside the bounds of Kremlin propaganda.

EVAN’S CASE has made headlines across the world, in part due to its singularity. Russia had not arrested an American journalist operating within its borders since 1986, when U.S. News & World Report correspondent Nick Daniloff was arrested under similar circumstances and released within weeks.

But reporting in and on Russia has become a much trickier—and riskier—proposition in recent years. For example, in 2021, BBC correspondent Sarah Rainsford was kicked out of the country after reporting from Moscow for twenty years. She was given varying reasons, but her expulsion came shortly after she asked Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, a strong Putin ally, how he could remain president in the face of widespread protest against his corrupt reelection.

Then in early March 2022, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin approved a law punishing journalists who print “fake” news about the military—that is, anything that counters the Kremlin’s party line—with fifteen years in prison. Critical news outlets were banned entirely, and multiple journalists were arrested under this law.

“Reporting on Russia is now also a regular practice of watching people you know get locked away for years,” Evan tweeted in July 2022. In a single evening in September 2022, at least eight journalists were arrested covering protests against Putin’s “partial mobilization” across the country.

But threats to journalists are not isolated to those reporting in Russia. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the number of journalists imprisoned across the world has jumped from 92 in 2000 to 363 in 2022, with the second-largest increase coming in the last two years. Threats of doxxing (publicly sharing address and contact information) journalists, and actual instances of it, are not uncommon for those working on certain beats.

And the US has its own share of concerns. Out in the field, journalists are routinely detained while covering protests. Between 2020 and 2022, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker logged 195 such incidents. In May 2020, a friend and colleague of mine at HuffPost was arrested while covering Black Lives Matter protests, despite his press badge on prominent display. At least five other journalists were arrested while reporting that same weekend.

Though these represented chinks in the armor of the First Amendment, they were all released within hours. Evan was not.

LIKE MANY of his friends, Polina has spoken to numerous media outlets about Evan’s case and recently began discussing how he’s keeping busy. He has access to a library and does lots of reading; he was making his way through War and Peace when Polina and I talked in early May. He also exercises, and “in the evenings, he tries to reply to letters.”

“He sounds very determined and focused,” she said, and he’s “still doing the thing where he cracks jokes, so he’s all right.”

This news soothes me, because it is the Evan I’ve known for over a decade, the gregarious goofball who makes friends wherever he goes, whose work ethic and ambition are outstripped only by his deep-seated curiosity—the qualities that, of course, have made him a good journalist.

But though it is heartening to hear the version of these updates—versions of which I myself have shared with journalists from The Washington Post to the Orient—Polina and I agree that they don’t come easily. It feels surreal and unnatural to be sharing snippets of our correspondence publicly, just as it feels weird to tell the BBC about the time we spent as next door neighbors living in Ladd sophomore year, or send CNN photos of us and a dozen other friends gathered side-by-side, arms pulling each other close, in various off-campus living rooms senior year; “family portraits,” we’d (semi) jokingly call them.

“We’re really conscious of it,” Polina said of sharing what would, in any other situation, be normal, private, utterly unremarkable correspondence between friends. “But at the same time it’s so important for people to get to know him, to understand him, to get to know his character.”

I’ve been scouring our past emails and messages since his arrest, and our conversations once veered from teasing about dating prospects to discussions of intra-newsroom dynamics and back again, all in one go. But my biggest takeaway now is the ease of it all—there is no email address, no translation and transcription needed; there are simply words, loaded with inside jokes and years of shared context, sent to my friend across the world, at the press of a button. I miss those days.

Nora Biette-Timmons ’14 is deputy editor at Jezebel. She previously worked at HuffPost and The Trace and was an editorial fellow at The Atlantic

Evan’s case has made headlines across the world in part due to its singularity. Russia had not arrested an American journalist operating within its borders since 1986.

President-elect Safa Zaki finds inspiration in Bowdoin’s mission to do good in a world that sorely needs it, and to pave the way for the next generation.

Particular Kind A of

Strength

BY ELISE GIBSON PHOTOGRAPHS BY JESSICA SCRANTON

WHEN SAFA ZAKI, the newly named presidentelect of Bowdoin, was being interviewed by members of the College’s presidential search committee, a certain quality struck her that felt compelling, a value that she hadn’t heard expressed quite in that way. And it was exciting. Bowdoin calls it the common good, an idea central to its mission that began, literally, with its first president.

“It was the thing that drew me in during the search process. You could see it reflected in the questions the search committee asked. And then, as I did my own research, you could see it reflected in so much of the College,” Zaki says. Many institutions, she notes as an example, offer experiential education, so that students can further their own education by doing good work in the community. “But at Bowdoin, it’s about doing good for its own purpose rather than because it’s a growth opportunity for you,” Zaki observes. “It’s a particular framing that I found very compelling.”

That initial impression was underscored in real time on March 9, when Zaki, having accepted the offer to become Bowdoin’s sixteenth president, came to campus to be introduced to the community. After addressing the assembled crowd in Smith Union’s Morrell Lounge, she wanted the chance to chat with students informally. As she walked through the dining hall, she asked students what they loved about Bowdoin. After naming Bowdoin’s famously wonderful food (of course!), they gave a more nuanced answer. “Nearly every single one said it was the people. The faculty, the staff, the other students. That just struck me,” she says. “It really draws you in. You want to go to a place where they say the people is the reason they’re there.”

A few weeks later, Zaki is back at Williams College, thrust right back into the thick of her duties as dean of faculty, a position she has held for three years. As a senior officer at this liberal arts college in the northwest corner of Massachusetts, she faces a full-to-bursting calendar of meetings and end-of-academic-year duties. Still to come are the head-spinning rounds of farewells, the packing up, and then a dramatic shift to Brunswick, Maine, and her historic role as the first woman president of Bowdoin College. “Remarkable” is her word for it all.

Zaki, the John B. McCoy and John T. McCoy Professor of Psychology, has spent most of her career at Williams, joining the faculty in 2002 as assistant professor and then quickly moving up the academic ranks to full professor in 2010. Caught between the world she’s known for twenty-one years and the role she’s about to step into, Zaki seems awed. “I wake up in the morning and I think, ‘Really? I get to do that?’ It’s hard to wrap my head around,” she says. “It really is such an honor.”

At the end of a long April workday, Zaki is in her third-floor office of Hopkins Hall, an imposing, H. H. Richardson brick edifice that has been renovated into an open, light-filled administration building. In person, Zaki is soft-spoken and focused, serious but also at ease in conversation. As she considers the arc of a career that has led her to this moment, she speaks metaphorically about the importance of doors: those she has opened, those that have been opened for her, and the many new doors that being president of Bowdoin will allow her to open for others. “I am deeply committed to finding ways to continue to open doors for people,” she says. “I wouldn’t be where I am today if people hadn’t done that for me.” Most compellingly, she thinks about how opening those doors to students of promise can change the world.

She also points with gratitude at the battles that women in academia fought for many decades to pave the way for a woman to lead, as she has at Williams, and then to become president of Bowdoin. “And now I’ve got to do this in a way that makes good use of this opportunity,” she says.

GLOBAL CITIZEN

IF ZAKI SEEMS HUMBLED by her success, she shouldn’t be. She has worked hard for it her entire life. Born in Egypt, she is the youngest of four children in a family that believed strongly in education. Her father was a statistician by training and worked in operations research for the United Nations; her mother taught economics; both set a high bar for their children. “They had this kind of unfailing belief in who

we could be,” she says. As a UN family, the Zakis moved around. Zaki’s earliest memories are of living in Jordan, then Egypt, Tanzania, and Trinidad and Tobago; later, her parents moved to Curaçao. “Growing up in different places, I watched my parents’ openness to learning from new people and new customs,” she says. “That openness was a core value they modeled for all four of us.”

At sixteen, she landed a scholarship to attend American University in Cairo, where she began her studies with the intention of teaching at the university level. It was a path she had set as a young child. “I always knew I was going to be a professor,” she says. “My father had been a professor at one point, and he talked about it with such admiration for the craft of teaching and researching that it felt to me like a very noble life goal.”

After her undergraduate degree in Cairo, Zaki went on to graduate work at Arizona State University in psychology, in the subfield of cognitive science. In those pre-internet days, it was a formidable challenge for international students to navigate the application process and meet the deadlines despite unreliable mail and other logistical roadblocks. In the end, her adviser at American University eased the process by recommending her to a colleague at Arizona State. For Zaki, that was another door opened. (That colleague in Arizona, by the way, became her adviser and was among the colleagues who wrote to congratulate her on her Bowdoin appointment.)

She firmly established her scholarly career by landing a postdoc fellowship at Indiana University, which, as she says, has one of the best cognitive science programs in the country with a who’s who of faculty. “Indiana University was

juggling their schedules to care for their two children. Despite the brief six-week maternity leaves that were common at the time, Zaki looks back fondly on those days. “It was a good life for a young mother. I did some teaching, but most of my focus was research, which I did when the kids were sleeping. You know, programming late at night,” she says.

HOW THE MIND WORKS

LIKE MUCH ACADEMIC RESEARCH, Zaki’s work is complex, technical, and difficult for those outside her field to fully understand. In lay language, here is how she explains her area of focus: “In my field, we’re trying to figure out how humans do this remarkably amazing thing, which is that when we look at the world, we know what it is we’re looking at. We see a cup, we see a pen, we see a familiar face, and we know who or what we’re looking at. That capacity is our ability to categorize. And humans do it so effortlessly that we think there’s nothing to it. And so we think there’s nothing to study. But, in fact, we are doing this remarkable feat. When you try to build machines that do what humans do so easily, we realize just how amazing our cognitive architecture is. And that’s what I study.”

As much as she admired her father, though, when she decided on an academic direction, she chose psychology. “We did a lot of math growing up. I mean a lot. So it was a little bit of a rebellion for me to choose psychology,” she says. She laughs now at the irony, since her research in cognitive science is based on building computational models—all math.

She actually discovered the field of psychology as a teenager. At a house where she was babysitting, she found a psychology textbook, which she pored over every moment she could. “I’m fascinated by the human mind,” she says. “That’s the kind of psychologist I am. I study how the mind works.”

like the golden ticket. I had access to some of the great minds in cognitive science,” she says. “It changed my life.”

“The wonderful thing about that postdoc was the time and space it gave me to work on research and publish my findings,” she says. “I am so grateful for that opportunity.”

Those years were also filled with family. In 1995, Zaki married Huff Templeton, a fellow graduate student at Arizona State. When the couple moved to Indiana the next year, he went to work for the university’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and taught classes in the business school. During their five years there, they started a family and began

Zaki creates computational models to test ideas about how that categorization happens and then builds models that mimic human cognition. “It sounds like artificial intelligence (AI), but that’s not what I’m interested in. I’m interested in humans and what makes them tick.” Over the years, she has studied the systems involved in memory, amnesia, Alzheimer’s disease. “My research is about understanding which brain systems are responsible for categorization,” she says. “It’s about, what do these systems look like? How do they operate? What kinds of variables affect them?”

At Williams, at least until she became dean of faculty, she combined teaching with research, often collaborating with students in her Concepts and Categories Lab. “The best teaching I did in the lab was walking students through complicated, experimental design or going through their code. The best teaching I

“I am deeply committed to finding ways to continue to open doors for people.

I wouldn’t be where I am today if people hadn’t done that for me.”

did in the classroom engaged with the research; some of the ideas generated there landed in my research,” she says. In particular, she values the experience of teaching undergraduates. “There’s something about that freshness of perspective that young minds have that I found really helpful in my research and teaching,” she says. “I was teaching things at the forefront of my field, and students were part of the conversation.” She hopes at some point during her presidency at Bowdoin, she’ll be able to teach again.

STEPPING INTO COLLEGE GOVERNANCE

IT’S ONLY in the past three years that Zaki has been out of the classroom and working full time in college administration. Before that, she had served on or led numerous campus committees, including the committee that sets campus budget priorities. She helped the college steer its way through serious challenges, including the Great Recession and the pandemic.

Zaki soon found that working on a budget committee was like second nature to her. Her parents, it seems, regularly called meetings in which the entire family had a say in how the household money was spent. “My parents would say, this is how much we have as income, these are our expenditures and our priorities. I thought everyone did that as a family,” she says with a laugh. “It was actually very good training.”

Through that experience she has developed a leadership style that she describes as collaborative. “Leading isn’t about deciding on a direction and getting everyone to go behind you. It’s about forging a path together and finding ways to elevate people’s strengths so that they can lean on those strengths. That’s my philosophy,” Zaki says. “You have to be open to changing your mind. I think that kind of leadership takes a particular kind of strength, and it’s something I aspire to.”

In particular, Zaki watched closely a few years ago as the new Williams College president Maud Mandel transitioned into the presidency there. “She has a way of being available and consulting and listening that I thought was inspiring,” Zaki says.

When she was asked about leadership role models her list was long, but she summarizes it as a kind of personal philosophy. “Leaders are all around us. They’re in different places in the organization, and I think you learn leadership skills from all of them,” she says. “You’ve got leaders in dining services and leaders in classrooms and leaders among the students in your lab. Those are all people who have chosen to make a difference and take on additional responsibility. I have admiration for all of those people.”

Perhaps her greatest inspiration came from her older brother, Sherif. He was a celebrated molecular pathologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where his skill as a disease detective led him to identify sources of mysterious outbreaks, like those caused by the Zika virus and anthrax. When he died in an accident in 2021, Zaki was moved by the outpouring of grief and respect. “I realized how much impact he’d had on so many young scientists and colleagues, people he’d helped along the way, people he had opened doors for,” she says. “I realized just how much I wanted to make a difference, to make sure that I lived my life in a way that felt meaningful.”

WELCOME TO BOWDOIN

AFTER PRESIDENT CLAYTON ROSE announced last year that he would be stepping down at the end of this academic year, a presidential search committee set up listening sessions to find out what the Bowdoin community wanted in a new leader. Board of trustees chair Scott Perper ’78 described it this way: “At the core we heard, ‘The next president will be an innovative and

collaborative leader whose values are aligned with a college that has an unwavering commitment to academic excellence, to the principles of diversity and inclusion, and to the common good.’”

In introducing Zaki to Bowdoin on March 9, President Rose said, “Our search committee and our board have found exactly the right person to lead Bowdoin College into its next chapter.”

As for Zaki, she describes “the honor and privilege of leading one of the world’s most distinguished liberal arts colleges” as a “dream job.” She, too, finds her values aligned with Bowdoin’s. “Their actions reflect their commitments,” she says, noting that the College’s commitment to diversity is reflected in its allocation of resources for financial aid.

“I believe that talent is more widely and equitably distributed than access to top colleges,” she says. “Bowdoin has done great work to make sure that the people who arrive are able to take part in the curriculum and the life of the College. But I suspect there’s more work to be done.”

Zaki is a champion of liberal arts colleges. She describes them as transformational places where students have the freedom and opportunity to stretch out and discover their calling whether in the classroom, on the playing fields or theater stages, or in casual conversations.

“If you think about the problems we face in today’s society, from structural racism to climate change to how new AI technologies will change the world, you quickly realize that in order to tackle them, this next generation will have to come at them from different angles. These aren’t just engineering problems; they’re problems that intersect.” If she were hiring at a company that was trying to address these problems, she says she’d look for someone with the

kind of well-rounded education that Bowdoin provides. Zaki’s own children are recent graduates of Williams and Middlebury, and both have gone on to jobs in software development.

As she thinks about how she’ll begin her presidency this summer, Zaki says her first intention is to get to know both the College and the town, to meet many of the people who have sent her welcoming emails. And then she plans to listen. “I want to hear from individuals how they’ve been experiencing the institution, the challenges and opportunities,” she says. “I think that’s the right approach in the beginning. I think it’s going to take a while until I fully have the sense of the people I’m leading.”

As she and her husband settle into their new surroundings, Zaki hopes to find time to pursue her personal interests. She enjoys gardening, although she doesn’t always succeed in the way she’d like. “Brunswick is in the same climate zone as Williamstown, so I’ll be equally bad at it there,” she says with a laugh. She is, however, an accomplished all-around cook and baker. Moroccan salmon, a recipe given to her by her sister, is one of her signature dishes. She also bakes her own pita bread and, as a result of having teenagers (and their friends) around, she says, “I’ve made a lot of pizzas in my life!” In Brunswick, Zaki hopes to gather friends and colleagues around her table. “I believe in the power of food and community,” she says. “I do want to open our home and get to really meet people.”

Any specific agenda for her presidency, then, beyond making sure the people around her feel respected and appreciated, will wait until she’s gotten to know her new home. After all, that’s how she was taught so long ago as her family moved from country to country. “Each time we landed in a new place, the most important thing was to have an openness to the people we met, and an openness to their own traditions and ideas and issues,” Zaki says. “And that’s how I intend to begin.”

Elise Gibson is a freelance writer in western Massachusetts and the former editor of the Smith Alumnae Quarterly

“Leaders are all around us. They’re in different places in the organization, and I think you learn leadership skills from all of them.”

BY

William Electric Black ’74 uses lessons he learned at Sesame Street to spark knowledge in kids that just might save their lives.

MICHAEL COLBERT ’16

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LEVI WALTON

Electric

IIan Ellis James has been electric for years.

LIGHTNING BOLT earrings dangle from both ears. His ideas cast shockwaves around the room when he speaks. He can’t sit still and at any moment has five different projects he wants to develop. Coming up in the theater world in the 1970s, he declared it in his name, christening himself William Electric Black. He chose William for his beloved Shakespeare, his literary hero. He selected Black for the period’s Black is Beautiful movement, and Electric because it’s “cosmic,” something else.

Around the dramatic writing department office at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts where he now teaches and we met to talk about his work, James is known solely as Electric. He brings to campus––to faculty meetings and his classes––the energy and inspiration from his long career in the arts, studded with seven Emmys for his writing on Sesame Street from 1992 to 2002. He’s written for Nickelodeon and produced shows at experimental theaters around New York City.

Born in Oyster Bay, New York, Electric went to Bowdoin in the 1970s with different ambitions: he was going to study economics. Yet, as he applied himself to the ideas of microeconomics and sunk cost, he felt a pull back to the characters he’d loved becoming throughout high school, while performing in summer stock theater. Because the College did not have the robust theater program and arts and performance community it does today, he felt he needed to transfer, first enrolling at Nassau Community College in his native New York before completing a four-year drama program at Brockport State College.

invited him to come along to a graduate program at Southern Illinois University for playwriting, he moved to Carbondale. There, he found immense pleasure in creating worlds of his own on stage. He started the Blacks Open Laboratory Theater––similarly electric, nicknamed BOLT––out of the student center and put on a couple of plays in Chicago. One thing led to another, and he was asked to start a theater company in Carbondale. Yet, as his classmates moved to Los Angeles and other places, he felt a pull back to his home state.

When he returned to New York, he got involved with La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, an innovative theater on 4th Street, founded by the late Ellen Stewart in the 1960s. In its mission, the theater recognizes the role audiences can play in the formation of art, and it sees the power of art as a force for change.

“I realized what I had taught myself was to really produce my own work. That was the journey, and I really had that skill,” says Electric. “So when I came back to New York, I didn’t have to wait and hand somebody a script. I had a space.”

He began producing plays at both La MaMa and Theater for the New City, where just this spring he staged a production of Romeo and Juliet: Tribal Rock Musical, in which he set the words of his favorite bard to rock, rap, pop, soul, blues, and gospel. Before Stewart passed away, she gave Electric a corner of the theater to produce his work and spoken word poetry.

Opposite page:

Electric

He quickly made a name for himself there. The school had a strong theater department, and he began to direct, write, and produce his own material. After years performing, he was amazed to see other people bringing his worlds––and the characters from inside his head––to life. When the department chair

His training in theater ultimately brought him to Sesame Street. He got his feet wet writing scripts, telling stories about how Zoe wanted a pet or how Baby Bear needed a break from playtime with Big Bird. Through his persistence, he got the chance to do what he was really excited about: write music for the show. He worked with the late Gail Sky King and wrote the “Gospel Alphabet” for Patti Labelle and “The Letter O” for Queen Latifah. He even had The Count send up Elvis as The King of Counting.

Opening spread:

heads into the community space at Theater for the New City, where his new show, Romeo and Juliet: Tribal Rock Musical, had its recent run.

sits on the steps of the legendary KGB Bar and Red Room, where he performed a solo show, Electric’s West Side Story, and where his Romeo and Juliet musical will be staged next.

“I’ve always loved music. Everyone knows it’s so powerful. It can be fabulous especially in terms of working with kids,” he says. “You have music, you have puppets, you’re singing, you have something else to offer to the kids. You’re not dumbing down to them.

“Sesame Street and these other shows are helping kids deal with these emotions that a lot of times they can’t verbalize. That’s a home run.”

One of the key lessons he took from the show was how much planning and research a season required. The work was arduous. Marrying a curriculum to various storylines, he felt like he was in graduate school all over again. In his office, he still has a series of fat, coil-bound research guides: African American Research 1992, Asian American Research Guide 1993. Through the research and collaboration of several people, the writers sought to understand what they knew and identify their blind spots. To offer kids such a robust and culturally engaged education, to help them learn and understand everything from the alphabet to counting, conflict resolution to the trials of the world they’re living in, he says, requires a true ensemble effort.

As much as he’s known in the theater world by his mononym, Electric has become famous for something else too, what he now describes as his “white whale.” Since 2012, he’s been using his writing acumen and love of experimental and participatory theater to address a burning issue: gun violence.

In 2020, gun violence surpassed automobile accidents as the leading cause of death in children in the United States. The New York Times Magazine reported that, as of December 2022, the “gun-death rate for children is nearly five in every 100,000.” Approximately two-thirds of those deaths have been homicides, mostly involving Black children, “who make up a small share of all children but shoulder the burden of gun violence more than any others, a disparity that is growing sharply.”

Throughout his career, Electric has worked to engage his audiences in storytelling and learning through theater and music. Believing that the government was not going to enact meaningful change, he turned to what he knew best: participatory theater. This work began

with his series Gunplays, a collection of five plays that approach violence in the city from different angles.

In The Death of a Black Man (A Walk By), Electric thrust the audience into the position of a community in the wake of a shooting. Seats were removed from the theater, and the audience gathered behind police rope, passing through a scene with bullet casings littering the floor.

“They were asking, ‘Did you see anything?’ ‘Do you know anybody––the shooter––that stood out?’ I had news crews coming in with cameras,” says Electric. “And they started to talk about the shooting. I walked the audience around to different sites of the shooting. Then I made a church scene. I rolled in pews, and they sat, and I rolled in a coffin. I took them through the whole experience of a shooting in the community.”

Handed candles, the audience members walked to the steps of the victim’s house, where they laid their candles and the boy’s mother appeared. A crew of twenty worked their magic to transform the theater around them. “A live wire of outrage runs through almost every moment” of the play, wrote The New York Times in its review.

In The Faculty Room, Electric brings the issue to a school, where James Baldwin High School goes into lockdown after a rivalry between two girls on the basketball team escalates and one brings a gun to school. His plays have garnered reviews from The New York Times and NPR, and the collection is being compiled into a book, Gunplays: Five Plays on Inner City Violence and Guns, to be published by Applause this fall.

“After I finished those plays, gun violence and control were worse than ever,” says Electric. “Because I worked for Sesame Street for ten years and for Nickelodeon, I started to think, ‘We really need to do something for kids and get them aware––prevention, awareness—what can I do à la Sesame Street?’

“If the kids are dying, it’s the kids who have to learn how to protect themselves and save themselves. That’s what I’m trying to do; if I teach a kid, we don’t have to depend on somebody going, ‘Well, you know, AR-15s, we’re raising age…’ Hello! That’s not going to save

those nine-year-olds. Something else has to happen. If I get these kids on board from an early age, and they learn that guns ruin a family or community, if I can instill that in a kid when they’re four or five, it’ll stick with them.”

Marrying the kinds of stories he’d been telling with his training from children’s TV, Electric piloted a program that uses the arts to educate children on the dangers of guns. He has partnered with several groups throughout New York: the Lower Eastside Girls Club on 8th Street, Avenue D. At PS155 in East Harlem, he got Chauncey Parker of the New York Police Department on board.

Initially, some parents and community members responded to his project with skepticism, saying that children were too young. Yet Electric could see that gun violence was so prevalent that children were already aware of it around them. A colleague of his was walking with his child, who asked him why there were

Below:

Reviewing the cover of Electric’s soon-to-be-released book, Gunplays: Five Plays on Inner City Violence and Guns (Applause Books, August 2023)

Opposite page: La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club was founded by director Ellen Stewart, the first Off-Off-Broadway producer to be inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame. Electric is the series director of poetry there.

candles and photos clustered on the sidewalk. Middle-schoolers come to school with guns in their backpacks. A six-year-old recently shot his teacher in Virginia.

Kids are perceptive. Rather than call lockdowns “stranger danger” drills, Electric wants to meet kids where they are and speak to them honestly about what he knows they’re seeing.

To open the door, he uses the tools he found so effective through his career in television: storytelling and songs. He puts dreads and a

little outfit on his index finger, and his voice rises to the screech of a Muppet. At the end of a recent school visit, students were begging their teacher to let Mr. Finger stay. He adapts songs familiar to kids, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” to teach them that a gun is not fun. He goes through what items belong in a backpack. He hopes that, after a day singing in school, students will bring those lessons home, and the message will osmose into the community—to younger siblings and friends. His colleague at the Lower Eastside Girls Club told him that they sang his songs the whole trip home. Electric’s hope is that when, years later, these children are confronted with the reality he knows is increasingly prevalent, they’ll be more likely to remember that Electric man who visited their school and sang with them.

“It’s natural,” he says. “People want to be part of something. If it’s devised and set up that way, where there is this sort of give and take, you’re not just the audience, you’re going to participate and be on board with it. And you’re gonna sing along.”

Just as Sesame Street collapses the distance between its cast and its audience, Electric wants to be there with kids in schools. This work builds off an old tradition, the Bread and Puppet Theater, a troop of performers established in New York’s Lower East Side in the 1960s. German emigrant Peter Schumann—a sculptor, dancer, and baker—made sourdough bread, which the audience would eat during weekly performances. Through food and engaging theater, the company politically organized against the war in Vietnam, and was a center of the ’60s counterculture.

With Gunplays, Electric ended performances with talkbacks following the show, in order for the audience to discuss the material, and

“I’ve been on this journey. The creative journey has been great. And, you know, sometimes it’s not just about that.”

Above:

A Gun Is Not Fun is one of several early reader books Electric has written to educate young children about the public health issue of gun violence.

Opposite page:

The Lower Eastside Girls Club has been a prominent supporter of Electric’s A Gun Is Not Fun program. NBC Nightly News filmed a segment with Electric there recently.

he continually adapted the script to reference current events. In The Faculty Room, one of the characters writes an essay imagining a world with Trayvon Martin and the children from Sandy Hook. Talkbacks provided an important moment for dialogue on the play’s commentary and the current state of affairs. Whether through Gunplays, “The Letter O,” or his children’s book A Gun Is Not Fun, the arts— books and songs and puppetry—give people an entryway for conversations. “They open up conversations about things that kids want to do or conflict that kids are dealing with,” he says.

At his last school visit, he brought along a full team to engage the audience.

“I had a piano player. I had a mime artist come in and mime out things: if they see a gun, what do they do. And I had Mr. Finger, and we’re singing the songs, and we’re looking at books. Parents and teachers ask, ‘Can this really work?’ I’ve done it so many times. They’re talking about gun violence, and they get it and understand it. I always knew if you find the right way in using techniques of children’s TV, they’ll be with you.”

He aims to replicate the collaborative spirit of Sesame Street and scale the project. The research involved with Sesame Street sought out parents, asking what they needed, whether support with counting or bedtime routines. With such apparent need for action to prevent gun violence, he wants to continue this in his own work today.

“It’s got to be a think tank. I want to bring different people together,” he says. “You can’t do it by yourself. If I learned anything from Sesame Street, you need the community involved. You need certain scholars involved, childhood educators, the gun violence community, people that have been trying to do things, the violence interrupters, or people who are aware of addiction.”

With funding, he would like to develop the project’s research component to see how theater and education can transform communities. He wants to return to schools every year, building out a curriculum that stays with kids. His dream is to give one million kids backpacks emblazoned with “A gun is not fun,” so that when they reach middle and high school, those lessons will resonate with them.

Combing through Electric’s work, I can see him in the architecture of my childhood––from Sesame Street to Puzzle Place. When I think back on my childhood in the ’90s, I can’t help but see the connections to Electric’s work today. What if gun violence prevention were as prevalent in schools as the “Got Milk?” campaign once was? Those ads had me drinking milk like it was my civic duty to support the dairy industry. I knew from preschool not to play with matches. Those messages stick. What could happen if kids passed by a poster saying “A Gun Is Not Fun” every day in their cafeteria?

THOUGH HE TRANSFERRED from Bowdoin, Electric stayed in touch with his friends from the College. While his time as a student in Brunswick was short, he saw “the Bowdoin guys were fabulous.”

When Kenneth I. Chenault ’73, H’96 was awarded The Bowdoin Prize in New York City last fall, Electric attended the ceremony.

“They rocked it, and I rocked it in another way,” he says.

He wants kids to see how they rock it too. If a twelve-year-old can pick up a gun and think to use it against another child, he sees that the problem runs deeper. He wants to emphasize the value of the lives of the people around them.

“They’re pretty pure, but kids go through a lot, and sometimes they don’t have the words to express what they’ve gone through,” he says. “I’ve found that Sesame Street and these other shows are very smart about trying to get in there with the kid on their level, to help the kid figure out those emotions, to help a kid stop and think first.

“I’ve been on this journey. The creative journey has been great. And, you know, sometimes it’s not just about that; it’s not just about loving Hollywood or being on the road. Something else calls you to do something. Some of my friends go, ‘Man, you’ve been on that gun violence thing for a long time. You kind of knew.’ It’s not a good thing. I just felt, you know, kids are dying. People have died. What is that? It breaks my heart.”

Human value is as important in messaging as it is in the artistic process. Electric was awed by his peers on TV. He saw magic in the puppeteers’ work, bringing his favorites

like Cookie Monster and Oscar the Grouch to life. His family––his wife, Lucille, and three daughters––have been in his corner, cheering him on at his shows over the years.

Still today, Electric is chasing something— that white whale. Having seen the impact made by the puppeteers he has collaborated with for decades, he wants to turn Moby Dick into a puppet. Contorting his hands, he animates the motion. Puppeteers rise from a swell of the ocean and animate a massive sperm whale, Melville’s obsession and a representation of Electric’s. He rises with a majestic flourish of fabric and looms over the stage. With a whoosh, it disperses. We can feel the electricity leave the room.

Michael Colbert ’16 is a Portland, Maine–based writer. You can find his work at michaeljcolbert.com.

Levi Walton is a photographer and director in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been featured in Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone, Dazed Magazine, and other publications. See more from him at levi-walton.com.

Above:

A frame in Electric’s NYU office holds a photo of him with two of the seven Emmys he won for writing when he was working on Sesame Street Opposite page: Electric stands on a corner in the East Village, where he has spent years writing, directing, and composing projects at theaters and venues in the neighborhood.

INTERVIEW BY ALISON BENNIE

ILLUSTRATIONS BY HARRIET LEE-MERRION

Bowdoin professors Barbara Weiden Boyd and Marilyn Reizbaum teach in different disciplines, and they are very different scholars. Professor Boyd, Henry Winkley Professor of Latin and Greek, teaches courses in Greek and Latin languages and literatures, ancient epic, Rome in the age of Augustus and as a site of cultural memory and identity, and the Ovidian tradition. Professor Reizbaum, Harrison King McCann Professor of English, works in the areas of modernist studies, contemporary Scottish and Irish literatures and film, Jewish cultural studies, and the history of ideas. Although there are millennia between the material they teach, they circle around many of the same stories— to be an expert on James Joyce’s Ulysses, it helps to know Homer’s Odyssey; knowing what Virginia Woolf means when she calls Clytemnestra and Antigone women who “burnt like beacons” in A Room of One’s Own is best understood by a reader who knows those classical tales. In this semester and last, both professors dove deeply into women’s writing—the word choices the authors and translators make, the stories they tell, the gendered lens through which they are viewed, and the opportunity for imagination left by the gaps and silences themselves.

1.

Titus Andronicus and Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, retell the stories of Philomela, and Pyramus and Thisbe, respectively.

2.

BOWDOIN: What made you decide to teach these classes?

PROFESSOR BOYD: My area of specialization is the Latin poet Ovid. And there’s been an explosion of Ovidian reception in the past couple of decades. I mean, there has been Ovidian reception since the Middle Ages—meaning people have used Ovid’s poetry and reused it and reinterpreted it and so forth. I had started teaching fifteen years ago on the reception of Ovid. And we read Shakespeare1

There’s this whole thing happening now with books like Madeline Miller’s Circe and Pat Barker’s amazingly beautiful The Silence of the Girls 2. I realized at one point that I had a bunch of students who’d read Circe even though they weren’t necessarily interested in classics per se, and I hadn’t read Circe [laughs]. And I thought, “You know, this is so interesting, that we have a whole series of creative works, coming primarily from women, about the women of antiquity, including the women of classical myth in particular.” That’s sort of the point of contact with Ovid, and where the idea for the class came from.

It’s about the continuing interest, fascination, relevance, and searching for identity issues that people are still finding in these ancient texts.

PROFESSOR REIZBAUM: My course stems from the book I’m writing on Muriel Spark3, which is about her aesthetics of ridicule and the way that is perceived. Spark—who was a very prolific and I think important writer—has only recently received her due. People have been coming back to her in the last part of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.

I think when you look at the ways in which she has been critiqued over the years, one thing that’s outstanding is that people write about her as mean, as cruel, as killing off her characters. Part of what I’m writing about is, “What does it mean to have an aesthetic of ridicule and what is the function of that?” One cannot help but think about it in terms of gender.

So, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to use that idea with a number of women writers who might have suffered the same fate at the hands of many male critics who, as I say in my introductory note to the syllabus, will have

lauded male writers for a very similar kind of writing while they critique and diminish women writers who are hard-edged?” Somebody like [James] Joyce, who is this figure of scrupulous meanness4, but with him it’s said to be audaciousness. In Muriel Spark it’s cruelty, and there’s something prohibitive about it, as if you need to close your eyes and run away.

So, for me, it was less about the way feminism tried to change the Western canon and what we were therefore teaching and more about testing this idea and bringing a gendered view to certain ways that we critique fiction writing. So I thought about other women who would have suffered a similar kind of fate, who have suffered criticism in similar kinds of terms.

BOWDOIN: Who else do you read?

REIZBAUM: We started with [Virginia] Woolf, of course. And, when I teach Woolf, I always begin by saying, “Okay. Everybody knows who Virginia Woolf is, right? What’s the first thing you would say if somebody said, ‘Tell me something about Virginia Woolf.’” And guess what they say?

BOWDOIN: That she drowned herself.

REIZBAUM: That she committed suicide. So let’s talk about that as a gendered idea. David Foster Wallace5, nobody’s going to say first thing that he committed suicide. Infinite Jest is probably going to be the first thing. And then we talk about that, about what it means to have a profile that is determined by that one factor, one that goes also to the idea, the kind of romantic characterization, in a perverse way, of women writers like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Virginia Woolf. That somehow they die for their art, or that they’re deranged. And although there is a correlation made between madness and genius that is not gender-based, it has a particular expression when it comes to women—it’s “hysteria,” which then accrues to the aesthetic in which it’s perceived.

So we start with Woolf’s “The Mark On The Wall.” Because it’s there that she’s taking up that idea. What is male writing? What is female writing? What does it mean to interpret something in a particular way? What are the

Classical and Roman allusions abound in Shakespeare. Ovid’s Metamorphoses was a frequent source of inspiration.

The Silence of the Girls tells the story of the Iliad, chiefly from the point of view of Briseis.

3. A Scottish novelist perhaps best known for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

4. James Joyce described his own writing as “scrupulously mean” in a note to his editor.

5. Writer David Foster Wallace died by suicide in 2008 at the age of forty-six.

6. In The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides writes “the greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about by men.”

conventions that one feels overwhelmed by? And that piece is a great way to start, to take this canonical writer and to look at the way she’s also been treated.

I based the course on Muriel Spark, so we did The Girls of Slender Means. I was worried, because with Spark, her affect, her tone, you have to work to be able to really get it. She’s satirical. She’s ironic. And she can be mean. Although, what do we mean by “mean”? I spent the whole first part of the class talking about meanness and all the meanings that meanness has.

BOWDOIN: There is voice, which is what you’ve just been talking about, and then voices— what a woman sounds like and how that’s interpreted, and the fact that she gets to tell her story at all. I’m interested to know what you think about the intersection for those two things. What intersections do you think students see? They must bring a lot of contemporary politics into the classroom with them. What is their response?

BOYD: It’s interesting. As Marilyn was speaking, I was thinking about the luxury of reading [modern] texts written by women. In my course we are also reading texts written by women, but what they’re all doing is essentially filling this massive gap from all of classical antiquity. There’s a famous line in the history of Thucydides6, where the Athenian general is commemorating the death of many warriors in war and talking about how men, the warriors, have the renown that their families will carry forward, but the women—the widows—their job and the way they achieve their glory is to be as little spoken about as possible and to be as silent as possible.

“The house sank into its centre, a high heap of rubble, and Joanna went with it.”

THE GIRLS OF SLENDER MEANS , MURIEL SPARK

A lot of scholars in the field have written things that play with that—the silent women of this, that, and the other thing. And that inspired my course title. But the reality is that we have very, very little—I mean, truly fragments— remaining from classical antiquity of anything written by women. The main name, of course, is Sappho7

Their latest paper assignment is to write a fragment. They have to write something that has holes in it, that a scholar would have to struggle to figure out, “What’s going on here?” [laughs] “Who’s this character? What is she saying or what is he saying about this woman?” and so forth.

So we have Sappho, but everything else is just representation and ventriloquization, you might say, of women. But there’s also this fascinating phenomenon where, particularly in places like Greek tragedy, you have these incredibly powerful women. I have them read Medea 8, for example. And one of my favorite students said about it, “You know, I think she’s really badass.”

But then we talked about, “Okay. So why do we have these male playwrights featuring females as the center of critical action on stage? Why does so much revolve around them and why are they the doers—why do they have so much agency and yet their audience is probably all men?” So we’ve had some great conversations about the ancient texts, and now I’m asking them to read contemporary works by female authors, such as (Margaret) Atwood, Barker, and Miller.

And it’s going to be interesting to see how my students think about it. Connecting to what Marilyn was saying, do they think there’s something distinctively female or male about the way these writers write?

BOWDOIN: These books are giving voices to women who didn’t have voices. It’s allowing them to speak and to tell their story. But in many cases it’s a very distinct woman author’s voice doing that. Does that matter?

BOYD: When I first read The Penelopiad 9 I really didn’t like it. But it was interesting, because the students in my class really liked it. A lot of them wrote papers about it. They actually made me rethink my feelings about it.

REIZBAUM: That really was the nub of my course: that there are certain qualities of writing—characteristics, conventions, dynamics, and so on—that sometimes become gendered. The example I use compares Clarice Lispector10 with Joyce. What Clarice Lispector is doing with a certain kind of stream of consciousness, with having characters have a brusqueness, a quality to the writing that seems compressed, dense—with Joyce, that made him into one of the great writers of all time.

In women writers, that often becomes their opacity or “hysteria.” And in the case of somebody like Muriel Spark, people will say she’s heartless. She kills off her characters, which she does: “So-and-so was found strangled the next day.” It’s horrible, yes, in some ways. But with Spark, it’s seen as ruthlessness or a kind of unavailability. In Joyce it becomes innovative, edgy.

BOWDOIN: At the beginning of coeducation at Bowdoin, in classes like the ones you two are teaching, you’d probably have predominantly women interested in the subject. Now young men don’t seem to think, “This material isn’t for me.” Do you see that?

REIZBAUM: I still think they struggle with some of these questions, as we all do. And that is, “What does it mean to write like a woman or write like a man? And if there is such a thing, then what does it mean to read like a woman or read like a man?” And that’s very complex. My way of approaching that is to give them critical voices that address those questions and not try to foreclose on the answers for them.

And I think, increasingly, binarism becomes an even more complicated question. And that should be brought into the conversation. Like, the last text we looked at was Are You My Mother, by Alison Bechdel11, which addresses the question of gender binaries, and it was great that Bechdel came to speak around the same time.

Barbara, have you ever encountered Liz Lochhead, a Scottish writer, her version of Medea?

BOYD: No.

REIZBAUM: She has the murders take place off stage. But Medea comes out, and when she comes out she’s blood-drenched.

BOYD: So it’s a drama?

REIZBAUM: It’s Medea, but it’s in Scots. And it’s also her spin on the play. I would really recommend her to you. She’s great.

BOYD: Just as we’re trading—there’s also 15 Heroines. Do you know this?

REIZBAUM: No.

BOYD: It’s a performance that was done by the Jermyn Street Theatre in London (and broadcast online in November 2020). Ovid wrote fifteen poems called, in English, “Heroines,” which are written as fifteen great characters from classical myth who write letters to the men who have abandoned them.

This theatrical group did this 15 Heroines with very broad reinterpretations. In many cases they kind of walk away from Ovid entirely. These reinterpretations are monologues… they’re no longer letters. And they’re really, really interesting. Some of them are better than others. Different actors and different writers for each one. Including a bunch of Scottish writers. But that’s interesting as well. It’s another way of always going back to the voice. There’s something they’re getting at that is interesting.

BOWDOIN: Do you think part of what’s going on is just what always goes on? Which is, Shakespeare shows up in all kinds of places. The Bible shows up in all kinds of places. Is it just a way to get at telling a story, by reinterpreting a story? Or do you think it is something more, to note specifically that it is women’s stories and voices that were left out?

REIZBAUM: You made a distinction between giving voice and having voice. And I think that the thing you’re asking is really answered by the first—it’s by giving voice. These days, talking about women’s writing is not the same. You don’t have that dimorphism, that kind of opposition—male, female. I was therefore a little concerned about making it into a course on women’s writing. So for me it was all about the style, all about the writing, and less about the canon. Interestingly, though, students in the

class, including men, were just so thrilled to be reading all women. I think you’re saying a similar thing. We still have a sense that there’s something missing, that the default isn’t everything.

BOYD: Right. That’s still true.

REIZBAUM: That’s giving voice. But having voice is something slightly different. And by virtue of all these things, it’s much more complicated.

BOYD: And the way I hear what you’re saying is having that voice can be interpreted as a mean thing.

REIZBAUM: Well, if the woman is harsh or angry, then often it’s critiqued or framed in a gendered way. And what constitutes anger rather than…How shall I put this? A kind of combativeness or a sort of noble resistance. What I’m interested in is how the language that’s used will give you an indication of these gendered ideas. That language is used to critique writers, and their voice is revealing. And that’s part of what I try to bring through in a number of different critical essays, like Hélène Cixous in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” which was very controversial when it emerged in 1975. Because she was, as many critics were in that time, trying to carve out what was called l’écriture feminine, a woman’s voice, a woman’s kind of writing. And the debate was, Do you write like a woman? Do you write like a man? What does that mean?

And of course, the best way to understand that has to do with there being a kind of idiom that, when men have dominated the scene, would be infused or informed by a patriarchal kind of vision, a way of using language, where some kinds of uses are better than others, or are upheld over others. That there are male subjects and there are female subjects—you don’t write about tea parties, you write about war12 .

So I tried to open this up. What does it mean to have a gendered language? And can we also understand it historically? In the period when Cixous was writing, that was the height of the critical challenge to the canon, to opening it up and saying what other kinds of languages, in what different ways, can we regard works as

worthy of being in the canon? Why are some things dismissed?

I didn’t foreclose on any particular understanding. I said, let’s just examine the way various people have come at this question and think about it and respond to it. And the students were great. So thoughtful.

BOYD: I had a guest speaker13 just yesterday, a woman who has translated Metamorphoses. Hers is not the first modern translation by a woman, but it’s sort of the first that’s getting recognized. There have been a bunch of women translating classics recently. Her talk was so wonderful because it was all about the choice of language and how down to the tiniest little details how important it is. And, of course, reading everything in translation raises a whole other interesting set of problems. We’re reading something written two thousand years ago in a world that was so different from ours in so many ways. The language is fundamentally different. We have dozens of translations by men who will describe someone’s hair as “her flowing locks,” or something like that. And my speaker yesterday said she had chosen to translate what a male translator had translated as “flowing locks” as “messy haired [laughs].” Students loved that. That was really interesting. But it really, again, brings out these amazing challenges with reading any text.

REIZBAUM: And I think, “Why haven’t there been women translators before this?” You know? And I think part of that is the idea that language was gendered, and that academia was gendered.

BOYD: Right.

REIZBAUM: As we know. I would actually have people say to my face when I first started teaching, “Women can’t teach Romanticism. They’re incapable of it.” It was astounding. No! But when you have people saying that and it’s accepted, then of course it’s going to prevent women from approaching certain work, certain texts. Not that they wouldn’t want to but that they won’t be permitted.

BOYD: Within our own lifetimes there were women who were trying to get PhDs in classics

7. A sixth-century BCE lyric poet from the island of Lesbos whose works, many of which explore the world of women, survive almost exclusively on papyrus fragments.

8. A tragedy, by Euripides, in which Medea takes vengeance on her husband for leaving her by killing his new wife and her own two sons.

9. A novella by Margaret Atwood that reimagines the Odyssey from the point of view of Penelope, known for her fidelity to her husband, Odysseus, while he was away for twenty years fighting in the Trojan War.

10. A Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and short story writer.

11. A graphic novelist known for her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and her graphic memoir Fun Home, she spoke at Bowdoin in March.

12. This is a reference to Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

13. Stephanie McCarter, a classics professor at the University of the South, whose translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses was included in The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022 list.

at Harvard, and they had to sit in the back of the classroom and the professor said nasty things to them and they were told that they would never really be able to get jobs.

REIZBAUM: In other words, it’s a very common, very long history, and it’s involuted. There is just so much at work that has produced these various outcomes. To go back to your question, at this point we see lots of people cry “postfeminism.” You were asking, “Why are these women approaching these texts in this way?” It’s very interesting. That’s 2023.

BOYD: Absolutely [laughs].

REIZBAUM: Some of it is about the current moment. Look what’s happening in social media, for instance, the way TikTok is being critiqued for how girls are represented and spoken to there. And it’s post-MeToo. And I think it’s important—I have male students in the class who are not put off, who are engaging with all of this material and all of this background too.

BOYD: If nothing else, they’re still trying to figure out where they fit and, you know, just the whole identity issue.

REIZBAUM: That never ceases.

BOYD: No. Never. Absolutely it never ceases.

BOWDOIN: In a couple of these books there’s reference to taking up space, and it struck me as so contemporary. You hear now, “Don’t be afraid to take up space.” And it seemed to me that it was part of the voice question, in that it’s an idea that feels necessary for women, specifically, to hear.

REIZBAUM: One of the things that’s always been striking is that male voices dominate female voices in the classroom. And, you know, it hadn’t

“Once, not so long ago, I tried to walk out of Achilles’ story— and failed. Now, my own story can begin.”

THE SILENCE OF THE GIRLS , PAT BARKER (NARRATOR IS BRISEIS)

really changed all that much in the time that I’ve been here. But recently there is a change. And I think it’s not just that there were more women in my mean women’s writer class. In my novel class just now it’s probably fifty-fifty. There might even be more men. But the women are not shy. They are not deferential. Now, this could be different women. I don’t know. But I have been struck by that. And I have been glad of it. So glad of it. Sometimes how they give voice might be different. That is, they might equivocate more.

BOYD: Put things in terms of questions.

REIZBAUM: Yeah, but they’re not deferring.

BOYD: I would say that’s absolutely true.

REIZBAUM: And it’s great. It’s a change. It’s a real change.

BOYD: I think you’re right, absolutely right, that women now don’t yield to men. They don’t say, “Oh. Well, he wanted to speak so I won’t speak.”

REIZBAUM: Well, I don’t even mean that. It’s more that women did not speak up and men often took the floor. I am struck by that, that that’s not going on in the same way. Glory, hallelujah.

BOWDOIN: I notice in both your reading lists the ideas of blame and comeuppance and retribution. That women are often characters used for that purpose in a story. That doesn’t seem to change, even with the women’s interpretation. I guess you can’t maybe change the story in retelling the story.

BOYD: That’s an interesting question. Because in [modern] fiction you have the luxury in a way of having this, you know, “Anything can happen [laughs].” Whereas my world is a world with boundaries—it’s not that they’re set, but there are certain expectations already.

BOWDOIN: Although, as in Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles, Achilles can be in love with Patroclus in some tellings and not in others.

BOYD: Right. Exactly.

BOWDOIN: But the women sort of don’t change [laughs]

BOYD: Well, actually, there can be some change. And I think that’s one of the interesting things. In so much of classical literature, because women are objectified, there is often very little recognition of there being an internal life for them. Of what goes on inside, of how they’re thinking about what’s happening to them. But, for example, in The Iliad, when Briseis is taken from the tent of Achilles to the tent of Agamemnon, there is one word: “unwilling.”

“She was led unwilling by the messengers who were sent to bring her.” That’s it. There’s no development. We don’t go there. But there is an opening, and I think that’s where the imagination comes in that is motivating so many of these works. Clearly there were emotions there. And there were desires and hope and, you know, whole lives that we’re losing.

It’s almost like a little opening that Homer left with that word, “unwilling.” Like he said, “Okay. I invite you, Pat Barker,” or whoever. “I invite you to think about that. I’m not going to think about that because I have too many other things to think about. And that’s not my world.” But it’s there, right? So there is something kind of great about seeing how these writers can find that point of entry.

REIZBAUM: But it’s not like they’re getting any kind of retribution—no. It wasn’t that they were trying to avenge something, you know, that had to do with gender.

BOYD: Right. It’s like, how are they being seen?

REIZBAUM: And why have they not? You get told a story the same way over and over again. And then you take a different character and look at it through their eyes, you vocalize it differently— it changes. That really lands with students.

Alison Bennie is editor of Bowdoin Magazine

Illustrator Harriet Lee-Merrion is based in Bristol, England. See more of her work at harrietleemerrion.com.

READING LIST

Aeschylus

Agamemnon and Libation Bearers

Margaret Atwood

The Penelopiad

Pat Barker

The Silence of the Girls

Alison Bechdel

Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama

Octavia E. Butler

Parable of the Sower

Hélène Cixous

“The Laugh of the Medusa”

Euripides

Medea and Hippolytus

Patricia Highsmith

“Under a Dark Angel’s Eye”

Homer

Illiad and Odyssey

Jamaica Kincaid

A Small Place

Yiyun Li

Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

Clarice Lispector

Near to the Wild Heart

Madeline Miller

Circe

Sianne Ngai

Ugly Feelings

Ovid

Metamorphoses

Dorothy Parker

“A Telephone Call”

Ali Smith

Girl Meets Boy

Muriel Spark

The Girls of Slender Means

Virginia Woolf

“The Mark on the Wall”

Anita Heriot ’88 has turned a knowledge of art and collecting into a finely honed craft of helping collectors and investors acquire and sell fine art, furniture, jewelry, and other valuables.

The Art of Advising

What draws you to the work you do?

My grandfather, who was a collector, sold his collection at Christie’s, and it became both a legacy for my family and important for museums such as the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

I meet clients every day who have built businesses, who are entrepreneurs and do the work necessary to make intelligent decisions around their financial assets. But when it comes to acquiring art and collectibles, all due diligence goes out the window. I love to educate these clients to prevent others from taking advantage of them in acquisition or sale.

What do you think makes art appealing as an investment?

We have learned that if there is true intelligence and careful investment, in periods of recession and inflation, art takes longer to depreciate and rebounds faster. It is a semi-uncorrelated asset.

Are there differences in the types of clients who want to invest versus those to whom you lend art?

Clients who want to invest are looking for a diversification of their portfolio. They are also looking for assets that are uncorrelated. The reasons for using art as collateral are varied. Many clients who have art, jewelry, or watches that have increased in value may want liquidity.

To sell these assets, one would have to pay high capital gains. Therefore, why not use the art as collateral and pull out some liquidity? Other clients leverage their art to buy more art. We will also provide an advance on a work a client wants to buy. We have seen clients use their art to pay their taxes and as a bridge loan for real estate.

How has the art world changed in the time you have been working in this field? Do you see differences in the types of people who buy art (for instance, in demographics)? The art world has changed dramatically over the last fifty years. When my grandfather collected, there were tight connections between a dealer and the collector. The auction house was secondary. What changed the art world dramatically was technology, the buyer, and the reason for buying.

Once a client could bid on an artwork on his laptop, that revolutionized the art market. You did not need to be in NYC or London. You could be in Brazil, Dubai, or Delhi. All you needed was a laptop, a way to bid online, and a bank account. At the same time, we saw immense wealth emerging in China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and other nations. The center of the art world shifted to these new areas of wealth.

In addition, the reasons for buying changed somewhat. New wealth wanted nonverbal ways

of communicating power. A bottle of Chateau Lafite, a Warhol Mao, a Cartier Deco Bracelet all told the world that you were wealthy.

Lastly, the art freeports opened in places like Geneva, Luxembourg, and Delaware, and this became a place where wealthy international buyers could buy art and store it in tax-free locations. The art became a hedge against economic, military, and political instability. Today these facilities store billions and billions of dollars’ worth of art.

Do you have favorite works of art?

I am a huge fan of German Expressionists, especially Gabriele Münter, as well as David Hockney’s landscapes and Wayne Thiebaud’s landscapes. However, in my own house, my husband and I love naïve landscapes and folk art.

Anita Heriot ’88 is president of the North American division of the Fine Art Group, a global firm with locations in London, Hong Kong, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Dubai, and Philadelphia. After earning degrees in art history, history, and Chinese from Bowdoin and advanced degrees from the University of London and NYU, she began her career at Sotheby’s in New York and later worked in auction and art advisory and appraisal firms.

For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.

Whispering Pines

Beneath the Headlines

ONCE HOME to Zeta Psi Fraternity, Chi Delta Phi (a local fraternity), and a student residence, Ladd House (22 College Street) is currently undergoing renovations to contain the Center for Multicultural Life; the Rachel Lord Center for Religious and Spiritual Life; the Sexuality, Women, and Gender Center (SWAG); the Student Accessibility Office; and THRIVE, which supports low-income and first-generation students and their families.

In 1928, when Zeta Psi was seeking funds for a new building to replace the 1903 shingle-style chapter house, Harry Oakes, Class of 1896, wrote a check to cover half the $100,000 construction costs. It was one of many philanthropic acts by Oakes over the course of his life.

Harry Oakes was born in 1874 in Sangerville, Maine, and grew up in Dover-Foxcroft. A classmate remembered him as “a quiet, unassuming boy, of average scholastic ability.” At Commencement, Harry announced that he was going to find a gold mine, and soon he headed for the Klondike. A fifteen-year search took him to Asia, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Mexico, Canada, and back to the United States. In Kirkland, Ontario, he hit one of the richest veins of gold in the hemisphere in 1912, worth an estimated $250 million.

Harry became a British citizen in 1915, but he chafed under Canadian tax laws, and he moved to the Bahamas in the early 1930s. There he acquired 13,000 acres of land, bought a hotel, donated a hospital wing and a school, built an airstrip, and imported sheep and coconut and citrus

trees to improve food availability. He hired local laborers and gave them hot meals, bus transportation to job sites, and wages that exceeded the regular rate.

Oakes was plain-spoken and rough-edged, traits that some found to be abrasive and others thought reflected his honesty and fairness. After donating $500,000 to St. George’s Hospital in London, he received a baronet in 1939 from King George VI. As an investor, developer, and member of the House of Assembly, he was the colony’s most prominent citizen. His relationship with the governor, the Duke of Windsor (Edward VIII, who had abdicated the British throne in 1936), was an uneasy one and is hard to decipher.

On July 8, 1943, Sir Harry, one of the world’s richest men, was found bludgeoned to death in his bed in the Bahamas, while his family was at their Maine home. The murderer(s) had attempted to burn the body. The Duke of Windsor engaged police detectives from Miami; by all accounts, they did a poor job. Attention focused on Count Alfred De Marigny, a twice-divorced man of dubious nobility who had married the Oakes’s young daughter, Nancy. He was disliked by Sir Harry and Lady Eunice and by the Duke of Windsor. The trial attracted international attention; mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner generated above-the-fold stories about the proceedings for a Los Angeles newspaper. After defense attorneys demonstrated that the detectives had planted a De Marigny fingerprint at the scene, the jury voted for acquittal. There were no subsequent official investigations into the murder.

Eighty years later, the question of “Who Killed Sir Harry?” remains unanswered and provides fertile ground for speculation, as numerous books, a movie, podcasts, and countless newspaper and magazine articles attest. Was it a mob hit orchestrated by Meyer Lansky? Robbers seeking gold? The house guest who was the last to see Oakes alive and the first to find him dead? Was the Duke of Windsor involved in a cover-up?

In Canada, England, the Bahamas, and at Bowdoin, Harry Oakes gave generously. He donated land and built parks on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, and he hired laborers during the Great Depression. As an overseer, he loaned the College paintings by Rembrandt, Hals, Cuyp, Gainsborough, and Hogarth. His estate in Bar Harbor was given to the College in 1957, used as a conference center for several years, and sold in 1973. The repurposed house at 22 College Street is part of Sir Harry’s enduring legacy of sharing his wealth for the benefit of others. With its lingering questions and sensational end, it’s easy to focus on the circumstances of Oakes’s death rather than the impact of his life.

John R. Cross ’76 is secretary of development and college relations.

At times, sensational news may obscure the legacy of a lifetime’s work.

LEAVE A PLACE BETTER

I started out in computer science. The tech bubble burst just as I graduated, so I went back to school to study entertainment. To me, visual stories transcend language and culture; they revolve around our collective human experience.

I am proud to work and raise my family in East Harlem, where I serve as chair of Community Board 11 and as festival director of the International Puerto Rican Heritage Film Festival.

Community boards are the foundation of our democracy. I became involved in mine after I saw a lack of investment in our community during the housing bubble of 2008. Too many elected representatives are completely disconnected from the day-to-day. We need politicians who will serve the people and then go home and be part of the community, and I’m trying to do my part. I credit that philosophy to my ninety-eight-year-old abuelita, who always told me to “leave a place better than you found it.”

That’s part of my hope for the film festival too, which is the longest-running film festival celebrating the island, people, and culture of Puerto Rico. I discovered the festival—now in its thirteenth year—in 2011 while campaigning for a short film I directed called El Caballero. I have supported it with my own films and time ever since.

Representation matters, and we want to create an opportunity for Puerto Rican filmmakers and the larger Latino community to compete at the Academy Award level. It’s just one way we can elevate an underrepresented population of American society and—more importantly—its stories.

Part of the reason I had chosen Bowdoin was for the fraternity experience, and that went away just before I matriculated. I replaced the social networking that I missed because of that with more time getting to know professors and exploring Brunswick; Richard Gnauck at Richard’s was one of the first and best townspeople I met.

For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.

PHOTO: KARSTEN MORAN ’05

XAVIER SANTIAGO ’01

Film producer Xavier Santiago ’01 directs the International Puerto Rican Heritage Film Festival and serves as chairman of the board of Manhattan Community District 11, where he lives with his family. In the spare time he doesn’t have a lot of, he collects watches, shows his Alaskan malamutes, and shares his love of martial arts with his sons.

THE JUST SCRIBE

After forty-seven years as a labor lawyer with Pierce Atwood, new class agent Mason Pratt ’61 is writing his next chapter as a mystery novelist and poet.

AFTER BOWDOIN, I spent two years with the 82nd Airborne as an intelligence officer. A fellow Army lieutenant was taking the LSATs and he asked me to come along. On a whim, I told him if I got into Harvard, I’d go to law school. When I learned I was the last person accepted in my HLS class, I realized I had to work harder. It was a life lesson.

I BEGAN WRITING ABOUT OUR FAMILY for my children and grandchildren. When I retired from the law, I joined a writers’ group in Georgia’s Golden Isles. I attended seminars on writing, learned the craft, and began to call myself a writer. I published my first novel, The Truth About Hannah White, a Maine North Woods murder mystery based on my cases. Maine Authors’ Publishing is about to publish my new Maine North Woods spy thriller, On the Knife Edge, about a CIA assassin involved in Ukraine’s fight to oust the Russians.

I AM INSPIRED BY GREAT WRITING AND MUSIC, the wonders of nature, talking with friends and family, and my new wife, Mary Lyons-Pratt—we found each other in our senior years (I was eighty-three, she seventy-four) after losing our first loves. We read to each other, sing and dance, and love to laugh.

For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.

1959

Charlie Graham: “In view of the lack of input from my fellow ’59 classmates in recent copies of the alumni magazine, I just wanted to let the rest of the Bowdoin community know that we aren’t all dead or in the throes of Dr. Alzheimer. I have recently heard from the likes of John Bird, Reid Appleby, Jerry Fletcher, Al Merritt, Rod Collette, and Deane Turner. Also, Shirley Stenberg, wife of the late Terry (Doug) Stenberg ’56, remains very active in our Camden church. As for me, I continue ‘circling the drain’ in a fairly active fashion, largely with the famous Men’s Cooking Club, which I helped start nine years ago. (I’m still a threat in the kitchen.) Are there any other extant ’59ers out there? If so, make yourselves known.”

backgrounds. Two other members of the Class of 1969 are prior recipients of the Distinguished Educator Award: Merrill C. Cousens received the award in 1996, and Robert “Sandy” Ervin in 2009.

1965

Bill Matthews: “Marcia and I just returned from four wonderful days in Paris and three days in Aix-en-Provence. We took two grandchildren, Camden and Jack— both seniors in high school—and we joined Cooper, a third grandson, who is taking a term abroad in Aix. Best trip ever for Marcia and me.”

Charlie Musco: “My career in the equestrian world continues to hum along with different competitions around the US. I continue to look forward to each one! Personal travel is still a big priority with trips to Italy, the UK, Greece, and Denmark (for the World Equestrian Championships) in 2022. My first in 2023 is rapidly approaching… the island of Mykonos in the Greek Cyclades this month. On a personal note, my brother—after closing his law practice in Brookline, Massachusetts—moved to my city of Winston-Salem, North Carolina! He was completely exasperated by New England winters and is marveling at the difference in weather now that he’s moved. My nephew will attend NC State University as a freshman in August. Wishing everyone good health!”

1970

From a bowdoin.edu/news story, February 27, 2023. Ben Bernstein has been chosen by the Bowdoin Alumni Council to receive the 2023 Distinguished Educator Award for his extraordinary contributions over five decades as an educator and for more than forty years as a psychologist. He has helped hundreds of students develop into skilled, engaged, productive, and fulfilled learners and has worked with people at all levels of the American educational system and from all socioeconomic

1969

Paul Batista was featured in the Spring 2023 issue of the Manhattan magazine Carnegie Hill News in a profile outlining his careers as a television personality, novelist, and trial attorney. The piece notes that “he is one of the most widely known trial lawyers in the country, whose first book, Civil RICO Practice Manual, is now in its third edition with more than 100,000 copies sold. His latest novel, Accusation, is about a movie star who is accused of misconduct with women.” As a legal commentator, he also recently appeared on CBS News to discuss the former South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh’s murder conviction in March.

Mason Pratt ’61

Catching Up

PHOTO: STEPHAN PRATT

Remember

The following is a list of deaths reported to us since the previous issue. Full obituaries appear online at: obituaries.bowdoin.edu

John E. Dale ’42

January 21, 2023

Spencer S. Dodd Jr. ’42

January 2, 2023

Richard A. Morrell ’50

April 7, 2023

Joseph W. Gauld ’51

March 31, 2023

William M. Patterson ’51

March 25, 2023

Harold E. Beisaw ’52

February 17, 2023

Vaughan A. Walker Jr. ’52

March 20, 2023

Walter E. Bartlett ’53

February 26, 2023

Francis M. DiBiase ’53

February 14, 2023

Alden H. Sawyer Jr. ’53

February 11, 2023

Peter Blatchford ’54

February 9, 2023

Charles Ranlett ’54

March 24, 2023

John D. Gignac ’55

February 13, 2023

Gareth S. Gelinas ’56

February 22, 2023

Wayne M. Wright ’56

March 4, 2023

Richard K. Fickett ’57

February 10, 2023

Michael G. Miller ’58

February 3, 2023

Kenneth N. Judson ’59

February 28, 2023

Thomas M. Jones ’60

January 17, 2023

John D. Luke ’60

March 5, 2023

Ronald F. Cole ’61

January 4, 2023

John T. Sack ’62

February 3, 2023

Peter K. Deeks ’63

February 2, 2023

Charles F. Flagg II ’63

February 15, 2023

Henry A. Martin ’63

September 2022

Richard L. Pettengill ’64

February 15, 2023

Russell W. Olson ’65

March 16, 2023

Donal B. Murphy ’66

April 7, 2023

F. Bradford Swenson Jr. ’66

March 17, 2023

Edmund B. Beyer ’69

January 22, 2023

John E. McCullough ’69

January 11, 2023

Ronald J. Mikulak ’69

January 10, 2023

Richard H. Card ’70

March 27, 2023

David R. Murray ’71

January 20, 2023

Steven E. MacIntyre ’72

February 2, 2023

Michael A. Ryan ’72

April 4, 2023

Lawrence Blacher ’74

March 8, 2023

Jonathan R. Prescott ’75

September 27, 2022

Edmund M. Sorenson ’75

January 8, 2023

Matthew S. Vokey ’88

January 29, 2023

Scott J. Wolfson ’92

February 20, 2023

Edward B. Hall ’95

February 23, 2023

Bija Sass ’95

February 21, 2023

GRADUATE

James H. Faux G’68

January 8, 2023

Edward K. Roundy G’70

March 28, 2023

John M. Grace G’73

December 19, 2022

FACULTY/STAFF

Polly W. Kaufman

February 3, 2023

John McKee

December 16, 2023

Ruth B. Peck

March 29, 2023

James D. Redwine Jr.

March 22, 2023

Raymond Tetreault

March 8, 2023

Bowdoin obituaries appear on a dedicated online site, rather than printed in these pages. Updated regularly, the improved obituary format allows additional features that we can’t offer in print, specifically the ability for classmates, families, and friends to post photos and remembrances.

PHOTO: ARTIST_CREDIT BOWDOIN MAGAZINE SPRING/SUMMER 2023 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 55

Peter Webster ’62 and his daughter, Amy Berg ’91, with artist Francois Pompon’s 1922 sculpture Ours blanc [The White Bear] at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Referring to the age of the piece, Peter comments that the two are “later version” polar bears.

Jeff D. Emerson: “Vicky and I are back from our three weeks in Italy in October [2022]. The usual tourist spots (the Vatican and Pompeii) were incredibly crowded, declaring, I guess, that the pandemic is over. Next up we travel to Montreal to celebrate the first birthday of our newest grandchild. Then the United Kingdom and, later this year, a river cruise from Lyon to Arles. So we have declared the pandemic over. When not traveling, I study Krav Maga, an Israeli martial art. Recently spent time with classmates Paul Batista, Jim Bowie, and George Isaacson, all of whom are still working; in Paul’s case a triple threat: lawyer, novelist, and TV commentator.”

Steve Schwartz: “In April, Steve Schwartz gave a master class in movie producing to students at Columbia University (film students at Columbia’s School of the Arts plus undergraduate film majors). Steve has an MFA from the writing division of Columbia’s School of the Arts.”

Bill Matthews ’65 and his wife, Marcia, traveled with two of their grandsons to France, where they met up with a third grandson studying abroad in Aix-en-Provence. The group posed for a photo together before ascending the Eiffel Tower. Bill said, “Best trip ever for Marcia and me.”

1971

Abe Morrell: “I took John McKee’s photography class in the fall of 1969. This was his first time teaching in the art department, having taught French at Bowdoin before that. Earlier in his life, John also studied mathematics and music. He was a polymath! At the time, I did not know anything about photography, but, from the start, I knew that John brought a special way of teaching it. While not ignoring the technical side of things, his approach linked art with its relationships to many other disciplines like music, drawing, poetry, Zen Buddhism, and humor. He himself would have equated his teaching style to a Bach fugue where separate musical parts come together to make a new whole. Years later, as a teacher myself, I adopted

John’s way of teaching, as it felt like the only way to do it. At a time at Bowdoin in the late ’60s, when I felt lost, John brought a light into my life, which continues to this day. I am only one among very many of his students who are indebted to him for his dedication, generosity as a teacher, and his lifelong friendship. John was a talented photographer as well, practicing during summers and sabbaticals. As good an artist as he was, he remained, at heart, a dedicated and influential teacher all his life. He thrived among his students because he always wanted to learn from us too. He blurred the differences between life and art in such a way that it was often hard for us to tell when his classes began or ended. To my mind, John embodied the best part of what a liberal arts education should be. He possessed a precise and rigorous intellect while staying agile and open in his ways of considering the world, and that was such a deep lesson to all of us who knew him. I, for one, would not be the person I am without him.”

1974

Peter Griggs:

“I’m pleased to announce the second chamber orchestra piece in my Imaginary Landscape series is now available on Bandcamp at rhythmsinmyheadmusicbypetergriggs.bandcamp.com. Imaginary Landscape No. 2 is the second in a series of compositions inspired by the landscape paintings of Swiss-German artist Paul Klee. It is scored for two flutes, two clarinets, bass clarinet, English horn, bassoon, trumpet, two French horns, two trombones, tuba, two harps, violin, viola, cello, string bass, tympani, and bass drum. After an opening English horn solo and brass chorale, the piece explores a variety of shifting moods, instrumental

Danny Alvino ’62 and Peter Karofsky ’62 met for dinner at Divieto’s Restaurant in Estero while vacationing in Florida with their wives. Danny said, “A great evening ensued, reminiscing with humor the many escapades of sixty-five years ago. Future gatherings are planned!”

textures, and tonal colors. It is presented in a digital realization, with an overall duration of just under six minutes. You can listen to tracks on Bandcamp without having to purchase anything, although downloads are much appreciated. Hoping all is fine with you. Cheers.”

1977

Andrea EasterPilcher: “My husband, Brian (thirty-seven years and counting!), and I moved to Ogden, Utah, in 2018 when I joined Weber State University (WSU) as the first female dean of the College of Science and my husband was hired as a faculty member in the department of zoology. Prior to WSU, we spent ten years at St. George’s University (SGU) in Grenada, West Indies, where, most recently, I served as the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. Brian, daughter Emily (twenty-nine years old and a licensed substance abuse counselor and RN), and I enjoyed tapas with Brace Young and his wife, Landis Becker Young, occasionally during those fabulous Grenada years. Prior to my appointment at SGU, I was a tenured professor of wildlife and conservation biology in the department of environmental sciences at the University of Montana–Western. I earned my MSc in wildlife biology from the University of Montana in Missoula and my PhD in the biological sciences (conservation biology) with statistics as a supporting field from Montana State University in Bozeman. As a wildlife and conservation biologist, I focus my research on the conservation and restoration of threatened species and ecosystems around the globe. This focus has led to working across state and international boundaries to facilitate collaborative solutions to wildlife conservation issues.

Research projects have ranged from snare-trapping and radio-tracking grizzly bears in northwestern Montana to acting as a biological and statistical consultant on a research project examining the effects of ecotourism and climate change on declining Adelie penguin populations in Antarctica to being the principal investigator on a biodiversity restoration project involving the reintroduction of beavers into the Volga-Kama National Nature Preserve in Russia. Other work has included multiple wildlife and marine research efforts across the Caribbean region—from wildlife trafficking (parrots and sea turtles) to coral reef restoration efforts to working with critically endangered island birds—and I have been in the field in the Russian Far East with Russian colleagues who were radio-tracking and setting up camera traps for Siberian tigers, Amur leopards, and Musk deer. I was honored to serve as a delegate representing the country of Grenada at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Flora and Fauna (CITES) for the Convention of the Parties (CoP) 16 in Bangkok, Thailand, and CoP 17 in Johannesburg, South Africa. While I have enjoyed writing about my research and presenting that research to a variety of professional and nonprofessional groups, my greatest pleasure has come from watching my students emerge as leaders in the wildlife and conser vation global arena. My husband and I have had many wonderful times over all these years with Jayne GradyReitan and her husband, Scott; Jim Winninghoff and his wife, Anne; and Jim Nicholson ’73 and his wife, Debbie. Best wishes to all of my Bowdoin classmates and friends. Weren’t we just graduating?”

Mariele Forte, Jane White, Lee Yule ’66, Dick Forte ’66, Frank Yule ’66, Wendy Lord, John Lord ’66, Jeff White ’66, Liz Ralston, Claire Ayer, and Bill Allen ’66 gathered at the Lords in Naples, Florida, in March. Jeff White said there was “lots of gabbing and laughs—ain’t life grand!”

Joe McDevitt ’75, Brandon Sweeney ’89, Leo J. Dunn ’75, Bernard Gallacher ’75, and Scott Wilson ’75 at The Boulders Resort in Arizona. They posed for a picture as representatives of the Bowdoin ice hockey teams of 1989 and 1975 to applaud the current team’s 3-2 overtime win against Williams that day in Amherst. Gallacher said, “The hockey gods were upon us! Congrats U Bears....Seems just like yesterday we were celebrating our 1975 win! Obviously, my T-shirt made the difference!”

Andrea EasterPilcher ’77 in an Amur Leopard cave in the Russian Far East.

FLEX TIME

After fifteen years of creating opportunities for Bowdoin alumni to connect, Rodie Flaherty Lloyd ’80 retired as director of alumni relations last summer to pursue new adventures— more time to spend with those she loves, including both of her engaged sons, hitting the road and having fun.

WHEN I WAS CONSIDERING A CHANGE after nearly twenty-five years at L.L. Bean, there were only two places in Maine I wanted to be: Acadia National Park or Bowdoin College. It was important to me to continue to work for an organization I was very proud to be part of. The best part of my years back at Bowdoin was the opportunity to meet so many incredible people and come full circle with this special place. Forty-seven years after we met in 1976, my Bowdoin roommates and I still get together regularly and often—either for dinners in Portland or trips to celebrate milestones. We’re so lucky!

MY MOM WAS AN AMATEUR WATERCOLOR ARTIST, and now that I have more time, I’m having fun seeing if I inherited that gene. I work a bit at my town library, and I walk every day. It’s all about the flexibility of time!

SINCE I RETIRED, my husband, Doug, and I have been treating retirement like an extended vacation. We bought a pop-up trailer from sports information director Jim Caton and camped all summer in it, and then hit the road for a trip to Shenandoah, Great Smoky Mountains, and New River Gorge National Parks. We’re on a quest to visit as many national parks as we can, and we’re about halfway there!

For more from this interview, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.

1979

From a bowdoin.edu/news story, April 12, 2023. Dale Arnold will be hanging up his microphone after more than forty years of broadcasting, twenty-four of them reporting on Bruins games for NESN. He announced his retirement during the Bruins’ final regular season home game on April 11. The team paid a video tribute to him, which included shout-outs from hockey greats Cam Neely, Patrice Bergeron, Ray Bourque, Don Sweeney, Charlie Jacobs, and Gord Kluzak.

1980

From the publisher.

“On September 6, 1970, twelve-year-old Martha Hodes and her thirteen-year-old sister were flying unaccompanied back to New York City from Israel when their plane was hijacked and forced to land in the Jordan desert. Too young to understand the sheer gravity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Hodes coped by suppressing her fear and anxiety. Nearly a half-century later, her memories of those six days and nights as a hostage are hazy and scattered. Was it the passage of so much time, or that her family couldn’t endure the full story? Or had trauma made her repress such an intense life-anddeath experience? A professional historian, she wanted to find out. In her new book, My Hijacking: A Personal History of Forgetting and Remembering (Harper, June 2023), Hodes draws on deep archival research, childhood memories, and conversations with relatives, friends, and fellow hostages to re-create what happened to her, and what it was like for those at home desperately hoping for her return. Thrown together inside a stifling jetliner, the hostages forged friendships, provoked conflicts, and dreamed

up distractions. Learning about the lives and causes of their captors— some of them kind, some frightening—the sisters pondered a deadly divide that continues today.”

Jocelyn Shaw: “I’ve been going to the New York State Sheep and Wool festival in Rhinebeck with my daughter for a number of years. It is one of the largest sheep and wool festivals in the country. This year I tested the waters and entered some handmade items in the Made by Hand competition. I spun some Corriedale wool, designed a fingerless mitt pattern, and hand knit them. They won third prize in the fingerless gloves category! My handwoven scarf won fourth prize in the small woven category, and a 3D woven wall hanging won fifth in the large woven category. I was over the moon, and I’m already planning what I can enter this October.”

1981

Tim Chapin: “Hovey Chapin hosted the Bowdoin golf team at Quail Creek Country Club on their spring trip to Naples, Florida. We joined the team on the golf course and hosted a dinner after golf. It does not seem possible forty-two years have passed since I graduated from Bowdoin! The golf team and coach were very gracious, and it was a joy to have them with us!”

From a bowdoin.edu/news story, March 23, 2023. Barbara Sawhill is Bowdoin’s first Latin American studies graduate, a fact she is justifiably proud of. Her fascination with the region, she said, began before she came to college. “I had gone to Peru as an exchange student in high school and knew that there was something about Latin America that I liked but I didn’t quite know what.” At Bowdoin, Sawhill knew she wanted to study

Rodie Flaherty Lloyd ’80 and Doug Lloyd

Catching Up

PHOTO: COURTESY RODIE FLAHERTY LLOYD ’80

Spanish but did not necessarily want to major in it, she said. “I became good friends with Hispanic studies professor John Turner, and we came up with the idea of doing a self-designed major in Latin American studies—at that point there wasn’t a Latin American studies department here.” She also got help from history professor Kathleen Waldron, who specialized in Latin American history.

Waldron and Turner acted as Sawhill’s advisors and put together some classes for her self-designed major, which also involved a lot of off-campus study. Sawhill split her junior year between the University of Connecticut’s Latin American studies institute and the University of the Andes in Bogota, Colombia.

“In Colombia I stayed with a host family, the Uribes, and became particularly good friends with their daughter Diana, who was about my age.” Sawhill went on to secure her self-designed major in Latin American studies and pursue a career in teaching and academia, which included spending more than twenty years on the faculty at Oberlin College in Ohio. In 2017, she returned to her alma mater, where, as visiting lecturer in Spanish, she is teaching two intermediate language classes this semester. Earlier this year, Sawhill was invited to a literary festival in Cartagena, Colombia, where Radio Ambulante was presenting a live show and where, by happy coincidence, she was able to rekindle a forty-year-old friendship. Also taking part in the show was Diana Uribe, my Colombian host sister from 1979 who, as it turns out, is now a well-known radio host and podcast producer, making programs about history and culture. It was so great to reconnect after all

these years. It’s also really cool to think that when we last met, I was a Bowdoin student and now I’m a faculty member!”

From a bowdoin.edu/news story, February 27, 2023. Dan Spears has been chosen by the Bowdoin College Board of Trustees to receive the 2023 Common Good Award for being an advocate who opened a world of life-changing opportunities to inner-city youth. Spears has encouraged generations of students in Baltimore to dream of experiencing a transformational education beyond the confines of their local area and worked to make those dreams a reality. He cofounded the nonprofit Bowdoin Bound with the goal of raising the educational sights of inner-city Baltimore students, urging them to aspire to attend colleges like Bowdoin, and motivating them to continue their hard work in the classroom. He then made opportunities attainable for these deserving students, bringing groups to visit Bowdoin’s campus in the summer, matching students with college mentors, and helping prepare students to navigate both the admissions and financial aid processes. In so doing, he provided a springboard for hundreds of young people to change the trajectory of their educational experiences and their post-college lives.

1985 Hossein Sadeghi-Nejad:

“After more than twenty-five years as professor of surgery-urology at Rutgers and service to veterans at VA NJ HCS [VA New Jersey Healthcare Systems], I am embarking on a new journey as professor of urology and director of men’s health at NYU-Langone in Manhattan.”

planning what I can enter this October.”

Vicki Weeks ’77 and Annie Gronningsater McKinley ’77 experienced a magical two weeks with a group of friends in Peru in October 2022, a trip that had been canceled twice due to the pandemic.

John Holt ’79, second from left, rowed in a gold-medal-winning boat at The Head of The Charles in late October. His Seattle-based team, the Ancient Mariners, won the seventy-plus, eight-plus event, setting a new course record in the process.

Jocelyn Shaw ’80 entered some of her items into the “made by hand” category at the New York State Sheep and Wool Festival in Rhinebeck, New York, and walked away with third-, fourth-, and fifth-place prizes for her fingerless mitts, handwoven scarf, and 3D woven wall hanging, respectively. It was her first foray into the competition at one of the largest sheep and wool festivals in the country and now, she says, “I’m already

Fellow Bowdoin swimmers

Sarah Holt ’99 and Dave “Ferris” Lawrence reconnected in Doha, Qatar, at Holt’s home in her adopted country. Lawrence was there to

the

1993 Reunion

Cat Sperry Beckett: “2023 marks my twenty-third year living in ‘the other Portland’ (Oregon), where I work as a therapist in private practice and adjunct professor. Bowdoin has been at the top of my thoughts because my son Dylan has just enrolled as a Polar Bear, Class of 2027! I’m thrilled for him and so excited to have the excuse to come back east more often.”

1998 Reunion

From a bowdoin.edu/news story, February 23, 2023. Ethan Kent kicked off the long-delayed inaugural event of Bowdoin’s new urban studies program on February 14 with a campus visit and evening talk in Kresge Auditorium. Kent is executive director of PlacemakingX, an organization that advocates for public spaces. He described his campaign to reimagine and redesign public spaces, arguing that they can lead to healthier, more inclusive, and loving communities. The lecture highlighted the concept of placemaking, how it changes the way we shape our shared public spaces, and how it can enable community members to be cocreators of the world beyond their homes. Placemaking, he argued, requires an interdisciplinary approach to prioritizing human connection over individual needs and even aesthetics. Three professors affiliated with the urban studies program— Assistant Professor of Sociology Theo Greene, Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies Rachel Sturman, and Senior Lecturer in Environmental Studies Jill Pearlman (who taught Kent when he was a student)—said that featuring a Bowdoin alumnus who has worked

in the bourgeoning field of placemaking fittingly celebrates the new academic program at Bowdoin.

2000

Dave “Ferris”

Lawrence: “I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel with my wife and sister to Doha, Qatar, to follow the USMNT [US Men’s National Team] at the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Not only did we get to quench our thirst for worldclass soccer by attending twenty-five games, but the best part of it all was reconnecting with fellow swimmer Sarah Holt ’99. Sarah was the most gracious of hosts....We got to meet her family, she showed us around her adopted country, we attended games together, and she hosted a delicious Thanksgiving meal.”

2008 Reunion

Garrett Grant: “Bowdoin alumni came from all over the country to get to the wonderful celebration of the marriage between Garrett Gates and Margaret Campbell in downtown Kansas City. The wedding took place at St. Agnes Cathedral with the celebration at The American. Even all the canceled flights on Southwest Airlines couldn’t prevent this Bowdoin crew from getting together and celebrating the joyous occasion!”

2009 Sam Tung: “Last August, my wife and I welcomed our first baby. My storyboarding career in Los Angeles continues to go well, with upcoming projects including work for Marvel, A24, Nintendo, and Universal.”

2010

Kauri Ballard:

“I recently got married in Melbourne, Australia, and a few of my Bowdoin friends made the long trip to come celebrate and

The Bowdoin golf team posed in front of the Quail Creek Country Club during their spring trip to Naples, Florida, in March. The group was hosted by Hovey Chapin ’81, who joined them on the golf course and at a dinner afterward, commenting that “the golf team and coach were very gracious, and it was a joy to have them with us!”

Five Polar Bears—Karen McCann McClelland ’92, Becky Bell ’92, John McClelland ’91, Sam McClelland ’24, and Jillian Horton ’24—hold a Bowdoin pennant in Wembly Stadium in London during the US Women’s National Team vs. England in a friendly game over fall break. Karen says, “We will look for Polar Bears in Australia and New Zealand this summer at the FIFA Women’s World Cup. Contact me if you will be there!”

follow

US men’s national team at the 2022 FIFA World Cup, and Holt hosted him with his wife and sister. He said Doha is “a little far from Casco Bay!”

see where I live....Allie Gunther and Camille Shepherd flew from NYC and Philly.”

From a bowdoin.edu/news story, February 28, 2023. The Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, Maine, opened its 2023 CMCA Biennial exhibition in late January with thirty-five artists, including four alumni and a Bowdoin professor. The Bowdoin artists include Haley MacKeil, Nick Benfey ’15, Mariah Reading ’16, and Jenny Ibsen ’18, as well as professor of art and chair of the Visual Arts Division of the Department of Art Michael Kolster. The CMCA Biennial, which has been running for forty-five years, supports and celebrates Maine-based artists. The artists in the show live and work in Maine or have significant ties to a specific Maine community, according to the CMCA. From over 400 applicants, the thirty-five selected artists stood out to jurors because of the potential of their artwork to make an impact—not only in an artistic context, but in a social one. “The artists participating together form a resounding chorus of perspectives, reflecting the pivotal moment in which we exist—the societal inequities we push against, our understanding of time and our transience on earth, the drive to understand one’s identity and lineage, and our relationship to the environment and our place within it,” said Misa Jeffereis, another juror and assistant curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. All the artists are part of installations spanning the entire 5,500 square feet of the museum.”

2013 Reunion

From a bowdoin.edu/news story, April 3, 2023. Acclaimed journalist and writer Linda Kinstler has secured a prestigious Whiting Award

for nonfiction—one of ten prizes recently announced for “exceptional emerging writers.” The awards, each worth $50,000, are given annually to recognize writers of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry. Kinstler is a contributing writer for The Economist and Jewish Currents, while her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, among other places. Additionally, she is deputy editor at the online culture and politics magazine The Dial. Her first book, Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends, was published in August 2022 and nominated for the 2023 Wingate Award. At Bowdoin, Kinstler majored in English and, as a student journalist, was editor-inchief of The Bowdoin Orient. She went on to study in the UK under a prestigious Marshall Scholarship and is currently a PhD candidate in rhetoric at UC Berkeley.

Tricia Thibodeau: “I’ll be starting a new position this fall as an assistant professor at the University of New England, where I’ll be teaching oceanography and continuing my research on plankton in the Gulf of Maine. I’m very excited to be moving back to Maine and hope to collaborate with the wonderful professors from the earth and oceanographic science department who inspired me to pursue this career in the first place.”

You are From Here.

Once a Polar Bear, always a Polar Bear. Stay engaged with Bowdoin in whatever way works for you—volunteer, attend an event, make a gift, or tune into an online program. All of it matters for the campaign, and more importantly, keeps the bonds of the Bowdoin community strong.

2014

Zack Burton: “A paper I authored is just out in Nature’s Scientific Reports Titled ‘Peak Cenozoic warmth enabled deep-sea sand deposition,’ it explores the impact of extreme Eocene climate (high CO2, hot temperatures, higher-frequency extreme weather events, and intensified precipitation ~56–48 million years ago) and sea levels more than 200 feet (>70 m) higher than

Find out more about how you can engage by scanning this code, or visit bowdo.in/engage bowdoin.edu/fromhere

Jump In Where You Are

Life moves quickly, but it can feel like there is always time downstream to take care of the things you mean to, or that you want to. Planning your estate—even when you wonder “what estate?”—will help you put provisions in place for yourself and your loved ones. The stream keeps moving, so it’s never too early, or too late, to start. Just jump in where you are!

207-725-3172

giftplanning@bowdoin.edu

bowdoin.edu/gift-planning

today on the global distribution of deep-ocean sand-rich sedimentary systems (known as turbidites). Our compilation of fifty-nine early Eocene turbidite systems distributed across marine sedimentary basins of all continental margins (except Antarctica) suggests that, despite high sea level, climate-driven increases in sediment supply may significantly contribute to the global distribution and volume of coarse-grained deep-sea deposition. This work has implications for assessing climate change impacts and the response of natural systems (both terrestrial and marine) to these changes, as well as for understanding subsea hazards (and their impact on, e.g., offshore platforms, submarine communications cables, and offshore wind farms), and for understanding global subsurface distributions of reservoirs suitable for carbon capture and sequestration. The story has been picked up by outlets in India, Indonesia, Spain, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Panama, Australia, Ireland, the UK, and the UAE. In other news, The Manic Monologues has been doing wonderfully lately! There have been a number of terrific in-person live shows since I visited Bowdoin in April 2022. For Mental Health Awareness Month (May 2022), there were three productions: one by Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut, one by New Tampa Players and Tampa Bay Crisis Center in Florida, and an Off West End premiere in London, UK (TMM’s European debut!). Hawai’i Pacific University put on a show in December, and in October there was a major professional production in Nairobi, Kenya (TMM’s African debut!). Lupita Nyong’o’s parents, Governor/Hon. Prof. Anyang’ Nyong’o and Dorothy Nyong’o, attended the premiere. The production was named one

of Kenya’s ‘Outstanding Plays of 2022’ and earned seven nominations for the upcoming 2023 Kenya Theatre Awards. In April 2023, one of Texas’s leading theatre companies, WaterTower Theatre, will run the show on their main stage, set to live music for the first time. A theater company in Aotearoa/New Zealand will bring the play to life for New Zealand’s September Mental Health Awareness Week, and a theater company in Slovakia is working on a translation of the play. In December 2022, I shared the film via a screening for Australia-based NGO Orygen’s inaugural ASEAN-Australia Youth Mental Health Fellows (with attendees from over ten countries) and soon will share the film for a World Bank anti-stigma event and an event for University of Illinois College of Medicine. Lots of excitement!!”

2015From a bowdoin.edu/news story, February 17, 2023. In February, Isaiah Bolden moderated a discussion on climate change with Vice President Kamala Harris at Georgia Tech, where he is an assistant professor at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Accompanying Harris on her visit to Georgia Tech was her senior climate advisor, Ike Irby ’09. This is at least the second time that Bolden has had encounters with White House officials. Six years ago, while in French Polynesia researching coral reef ecosystems, he ran into President Barack Obama, who was there touring research projects in Tetiaroa.

From Meaghan Dwan Titterton: “Meaghan Dwan married Patrick Titterton (Holy Cross ’15) on October 1, 2022, in Post Mills, Vermont. We spent the weekend in the woods with our loved ones and couldn’t have imagined a better celebration.”

Nancy Milam and Liz Armstrong in the Office of Gift Planning can help you think about making a plan, wherever you are in this stream of life.

Celebrate

1. Emma Stanislawski ’13 and Ross Millard (Wheaton College) were married on November 3, 2022, in Brooklyn, New York. Pictured: Peter Woods ’13, Meghan Marr ’14, Simon Bordwin ’13, Matt Marr ’13, Ali Fradin ’13, Ali Foradas ’10, Sam Waterbury ’11, Liza LePage ’13, Isaac Brower ’13, Elizabeth Schetman ’13, Bridget O’Carroll ’13, Julia Bensimon ’13, Julia Graham ’13, Phil Cuddeback ’13, and Emma and Ross.

2. Meaghan Dwan ’15 and Patrick Titterton (Holy Cross ’15) were married on October 1, 2022, in Post Mills, Vermont. Pictured: Elise Engquist ’15, Sofi Llanso ’18, Marisa BrowningKamins MacDonald ’16, Tim Hanley ’15, Chris MacDonald ’16, John Lefeber ’14, Pam Stone ’80, David Stone ’80, Kate Witteman ’15, Ali Considine ’15, Adrienne O’Donnell Lefeber ’15, Natalie Kass-Kaufman ’15, Caitlin Whalen ’15, Dana White ’15, Elizabeth Carew ’15, and Meaghan and Pat.

3. Ellen Grenley ’06 and Timothy McKernan (University of Virginia ’06) were married on September 24, 2022, at the Menauhant Yacht Club in East Falmouth, Massachusetts. Pictured: Kristina Sisk Bush ’06, Kendall Brown Reed ’06, Elizabeth Droggitis ’06, Victoria Lichtendorf ’97, Sarah Riley ’06, Molly Dorkey ’06, Ellen and Tim, Billy Mauke ’06, Matt Neidlinger ’06, Dan Chaput ’06, Kate Cary Sandak ’06, Becky Sargent McLean ’06, Ford Barker ’06, and Connor Fitzgerald ’06. In attendance but not pictured: Sophie Wiss ’06.

4. Kauri Ballard ’10 and Mark Lim (King’s College-London ’11) were married on February 10, 2023, in Melbourne, Australia. Pictured: Allie Gunther ’10, Mark and Kauri, and Camille Shepherd ’10.

5. Garrett Gates ’08 and Molly Campbell (Notre Dame ’12) were married on December 30, 2022, at St. Agnes Cathedral in Kansas City, Kansas. Pictured: Katherine Armstrong ’08, Lindsey Bruett ’09, Christopher Burrage ’08, Molly and Garrett, Phil Wilson ’08, Peter Garrett ’83, Kori LaMontagne ’08, and Liza Cohen ’08.

With its abundance of trees and rivers, Maine was once home to a booming pulp and paper industry. While still important to the state, the sector has shrunk significantly in recent years, with employment falling from more than ten thousand some twenty years ago to around three thousand today. This has been challenging for the state’s mill towns, many of them reliant on the paper industry for their economic survival. We look at a handful of them and how they’ve adjusted.

Turning the Page

BUCKSPORT

Bucksport, in Downeast Maine, has enjoyed some success in rebounding from the 2014 closure of its paper mill, Verso, which once employed more than a thousand people. Anticipating the mill’s eventual closure, the town began setting aside money three decades earlier to help prepare for a more diverse economic future. Among the projects in the pipeline is a major land-based salmon farm on the site of the old mill.

JAY

After making paper continuously since the 1880s, the central Maine town now faces a difficult future. Jay’s last remaining mill, Pixelle Androscoggin, employing 230 people, closed in March, the mill owners citing “economic forces beyond our control.” In the 1980s, the Jay paper mill employed 1,500 people, most of whom walked out of their jobs in 1987 in a historic sixteen-month strike that sharply divided the town.

LINCOLN

A papermaking tradition dating back nearly 140 years came to an end in 2015, when Lincoln Paper and Tissue filed for bankruptcy. The northern Maine town received an economic boost recently, however, with the announcement of an agreement with a Mainebased energy company to develop a biofuels refinery on the site of the old mill, now known as the Lincoln Technology Park. The project is expected to ultimately bring five hundred new jobs to the area.

MADAWASKA

Situated on the Canadian border in far northern Maine, the French-speaking town of Madawaska has been making paper since 1925 and is still very much in the business, with Twin Rivers Paper Company currently employing about 430 people. One of the challenges the mill faces today is finding enough workers to fill positions. This led to recent protests by some employees, unhappy at being forced to work overtime and with the possible risk it poses for workplace safety.

MILLINOCKET

The Great Northern Paper Mill in Millinocket was once among the biggest in the world. When it closed in 2008, it brought to an end more than a hundred years of history, hollowing out a once prosperous central Maine community. There’s been some optimism in recent years, however, with plans taking shape to revitalize the mill, including a proposal to develop a wood pellet production facility.

WESTBROOK

This southern Maine town’s connection to the papermaking industry goes back to the 1730s (when paper was still made from rags!). In the nineteenth century, the SD Warren Paper Mill grew to become the largest in the world, producing 35,000 pounds of the stuff every year by 1880. Today, Westbrook still makes paper, albeit on a much smaller scale, and many of the town’s historic mill buildings have been successfully redeveloped as apartments and commercial spaces.

HANGING SHEETS

Workers at the Eastern Fine Paper mill in Brewer, Maine, hang paper up to dry in 1921. Incorporated by lumber baron Frederick Wellington Ayer in 1889, the mill closed permanently in 2004.