Bowdoin Magazine, Vol. 92, No. 2, Winter 2021

WINTER 2021 VOL. 92 NO. 2

THE PRESENT NEVER STOPS

Contents WINTER 2021 VOL. 92 NO. 2

30 Fueled by the Grappling

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich interviews author Melissa Faliveno about writing our way in the world through stories.

36 Unrelenting

22 On the Prow of Liberty

Eighty years ago, in a different kind of global maelstrom, an innovative new ship design helped turn the tide of war, and many of those vessels wore a Bowdoin name.

Trying to make sense of 2020 is going to take a while—but Bowdoin faculty were teaching about the effects and ramifications of 2020 even as it was happening.

48 Q&A

Jamie Russo ’01 talks about how COVID-19 has affected the travel industry.

Forward 5

Make Your Own Path: Olivia Raisner ’15

on communicating creatively.

7

Dine: A hearty clam chowder recipe from

Sara Sheehy Finnerty ’93.

8

All Things Arctic: History and wonder

abound in Bowdoin’s world-class Arctic museum, illustrated by Kelsey Oseid.

16

By the Numbers: Stats from around Brunswick.

18

Freestyling Finland: Renae Anderson ’21 skis for the US Junior National Team.

Column 20 Reaching: Claudia Villar-Leeman ’15 contemplates friendship, temporality, and hope.

Connect 51

David D. Daniels III ’76 on intersections of history and faith.

55

Shelley Hearne ’83 advocates for public health.

57

Kendall Burman ’00 focuses on hidden threats.

60 Viraj Gandhi ’14 slays dragons.

In Every Issue 4

Respond

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BEFORE THEY WERE LEGENDS They would go on to become icons in Bowdoin athletics, but in this photo, taken in 1936 or 1937, Dan Hanley ’39 (left) and Nels Corey ’39 (right) teamed up to clear snow from the hockey rink. They had become good friends as teammates at Governor Dummer Academy in Massachusetts, and they traveled to Bowdoin together in the back of a truck, filled with furniture and driven by Dan’s father. They were roommates in their first year and played together on Bowdoin’s football, hockey, and baseball teams. Corey, one of the greatest athletes in Bowdoin’s history, coached at Bowdoin in various positions between 1955 and 1965, and Hanley, four-time chief physician for US Olympic teams, served as Bowdoin’s physician for more than three decades.

George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives

Respond

Icy Saltwater CONTINUED CONGRATULATIONS on a fantastic publication—I always enjoy receiving it and always learn something significant. I’ve been moved to write after reading Surya Milner ’19’s piece, “Inhabited,” in the Fall 2020 edition.

As an adopted Mainer who understands that my family’s centuries-long Maine connections will never wash away the stain that I was born “outta state,” as well as an amateur genealogist myself, I was immediately drawn to her subject as well as aghast at what she discovered. In my experience, Mainers have a well-formed idea of their state and themselves (well, several, actually, depending on where in Maine you find yourself), but we should all know that history is way more complex (and interesting and surprising and, oftentimes, brutal) than anything the current understanding can provide. In Maine, we can start with the Abenaki and proceed chronologically from there. This particular story of Malaga was an important, unforeseen, and absolutely necessary splash of icy saltwater. Thank you, Surya, for writing it, and thank you, Bowdoin Magazine, for publishing it. I look forward to learning more, but I never would have known to look without all of you.

David Decker-Drane ’89

A LONG WAY TO GO Surya Milner ’19 should be applauded for this moving and haunting story. There is so much history we need to hear about and talk about.

The response from Marnie’s father to questions about their ancestor was identical to something my wife and I heard listening to the history of

nineteenth-century Black families in Vergennes and Ferrisburgh, Vermont, in an NPR story.

Or the story of the historic African American cemetery in Washington, DC, where the graves were moved to allow development, but the headstones were discarded and were recently discovered in the waters of the

facebook.com/bowdoin

Potomac River, having been placed in the river as a breakwater.

It does not make me proud to see how minority groups have been treated. We still have a long way to go.

STAY IN TOUCH!

CORRECTION

Reach out and update us on what you’ve been up to since graduation. Send us an email at classnews@ bowdoin.edu.

The profile of Janelle Charles ’06 in our last issue incorrectly listed her graduate school. She is studying

To read the full versions of these excerpted letters, plus additional mail, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.

Robert Q. Terrill ’79

@BowdoinCollege

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at the University of California–San Francisco (UCSF).

@bowdoincollege

MAGAZINE STAFF Editor Matt O’Donnell P’24 Consulting Editor Scott Schaiberger ’95 Executive Editor Alison Bennie Associate Editor Leanne Dech Designer and Art Director Melissa Wells Design Consultant 2COMMUNIQUÉ Contributors Ed Beem P’13 Jim Caton Doug Cook Cheryl Della Pietra Rebecca Goldfine Scott Hood Micki Manheimer Tom Porter On the Cover: Illustrations by Lincoln Agnew 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.

PHOTO: SÉAN ALONZO HARRIS

Forward FROM BOWDOIN AND BEYOND

OLIVIA RAISNER ’15

MAKE YOUR OWN PATH I’ve tried to follow advice from my first boss: don’t worry about a path, just take jobs that seem interesting. I worked on campaigns, on a TV show in Los Angeles, speechwriting in Latvia. I spent the last year and a half traveling with the Biden campaign, helping tell stories about where Americans are mentally, financially, even spiritually. It’s been incredible.

The study of government is about questions I’ve been asking since I was young. How is it that half the country votes one way, and half the other? We’re not just divided on a candidate; we look so differently at issues. As Professor Yarbrough taught us, any political issue rests on values, morals, philosophy. Working on campaigns is a way to continue that. A group of passionate people giving up their routines to work together for a common goal—if you’ve ever played a team sport, you know.

Digital audiences are scrolling eighty miles an hour, inundated with ads and photos. My rule is, “Get in late, leave early.” We’d spend hours interviewing an ICU nurse about access to PPE, then cut it to thirty seconds and open on her most gut-wrenching line, “I can’t hug my kids. I’m a mom.

And I cannot touch my kids,” so that people would listen.

My mom (Carolyn ’85) was a theater major, and she encouraged my brother (Andrew ’12) and me to be creative.

We didn’t have coloring books, we had “anti-coloring books”—essentially, blank pages. Her message was clear: make up your own stuff! And that’s a lot of what digital work is, thinking up new ways to engage and communicate.

For more of our interview with Olivia, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.

PHOTO: ANDRÉ CHUNG

Olivia Raisner ’15 was traveling digital director for the Biden campaign (you may have seen her viral video tweet of President Obama draining a long threepointer while campaigning for his former VP—at last count, the video had 20.8 million views). Olivia relocated to Washington, DC, in January where she resumed her digital role in the new Biden-Harris administration. She’s wearing a mask in consideration of the administration’s 100-day mask challenge announced in January.

Forward Athletics

Campus Life

TRACK GIVING BACK

An Alternative, Alternative Winter Break Program TWO THINGS HAVEN’T CHANGED this pandemic winter: the long break between semesters, and the extra hands needed by so many nonprofits— actually amplified in the depressed economy.

In light of this, the McKeen Center for the Common Good decided not to cancel its annual Alternative Winter Break (AWB) trips this January. But, for COVID-19 safety reasons, it had to reshape the program. Typically, AWB trips are immersive one-week experiences that take place around the country and world. Students live, eat, and work together, volunteering in person with different organizations around a shared theme, like homelessness or refugee education.

Instead of using its AWB funds to support travel and living expenses for these small groups, the McKeen Center divided the money into mini-grants available to eligible students.

Interested students applied for funds of either $500 or $1,000—to cover either fifty hours or 100 hours of volunteering—and selected the nonprofit they wanted to work with.

In the end, the center awarded grants to sixty-four students—almost all who applied—

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who volunteered with schools, food banks, research centers, and more. Most worked virtually. Nina Badger ’22 ran online pro bono clinics for a legal nonprofit. Ines Dushime ’23 mentored young girls at Gisimba Memorial Center, a Rwandan organization that took care of her mother after she was orphaned in the civil war. Ladislaw Nzeyimana ’24 assisted a campaign to end youth incarceration in Maine.

“Some students had really ambitious individual projects, but we were also fine with a student who wanted to volunteer at their local food pantry,” McKeen Center Director Sarah Seames said. “We wanted them to do something that was meaningful to them and would help their communities.”

Last summer, responding to a nationwide racial reckoning, head women’s track and field coach L.J. Que and a group of student-athletes approached Jerry Edwards ’04 and Rose Barboza of Black Owned Maine with an idea. Claire Traum ’21, Gillian King ’22, and Jada Scotland ’23 had an idea for a fundraiser—they wanted to power the racial justice movement in Maine with actual movement. They called their effort Bear the Torch and invited Bowdoin teammates, alumni, coaches, students, faculty, staff, family, and friends to pledge one cent per mile over the course of a week as they ran, biked, walked, or otherwise self-propelled with an initial goal of covering 3,300 miles (roughly the distance across the country from San Francisco to Brunswick) and raising $3,300.

At the end of a single week, Bear the Torch collected more than $6,800, which Black Owned Maine has used to create the first Maine directory of Black-owned businesses, award microgrants to local businesses and families, provide educational resources, promote allyship, and develop plans to incubate small businesses.

Mohamed Kilani ’21 received an Alternative Winter Break grant from the McKeen Center to work with Waynflete School in Portland. An education and Hispanic studies major, he assisted a Spanish teacher, and he also worked on a mural for a study space. His mural (above), #Give Love, was inspired by a survey he sent out to students, asking them what they see in their future.

PHOTO: MOHAMED KILANI ’21

Dine

New England Clam Chowder Recipe by Sara Sheehy Finnerty ’93 This clam chowder is a classic New England-style. You can find all kinds of versions at Maine restaurants these days, but that wasn’t always the case— in 1939, a Maine legislator facetiously prepared a bill outlawing the use of tomatoes in clam chowder, and the Maine Hotel Association held a contest to end “the chowder war.” The judges voted unanimously for the Maine version.

Serves four to six 30 littleneck clams, or other quahogs DID YOU KNOW? Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick contains not only references to quahogs (or, as written by Melville, quohogs), but also this about chowder: “…a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the apparently cheerless prospect before us.

But when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully explained.

Oh! sweet friends, hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuits, and salted pork cut up into little flakes! the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the frosty voyage…we dispatched it with great expedition.”

2 large white potatoes, peeled and diced into evenly sized cubes 3 tablespoons of butter, divided

Scrub the clams clean and soak them in cold water for 15 minutes. Place them in a large lidded pot in 2 ½ cups of water and place over high heat. Steam them, covered, until the clams are open. Discard any that do not open. Remove the clams from the pot, reserving the liquid, and take the clams out of the shells. Discard the shells and cut the clams into small pieces and set aside. Strain the reserved liquid through a fine mesh strainer two times and set aside.

Place the diced potatoes in a medium pot and add water to cover them. Add one tablespoon of the butter, season to taste with salt and pepper, and bring to a boil. Cook until tender but not mushy, checking after five minutes and every few minutes thereafter if they are not yet tender, and then drain, setting aside some of the cooking water.

Pour a few drops of olive oil into a Dutch oven or other large pot, add the chopped onion and bacon, and sauté over medium heat until the bacon is cooked but not crispy and the onion is translucent.

Add a tablespoon of butter and the flour to the bacon and onion mixture and cook, stirring, for 1 minute. Add the potatoes, ¼ cup of the potato water, and the diced clams, and stir until fully combined. Add the reserved clam cooking liquid and bring to a boil. Cook, stirring, for 2 to 3 minutes, until the chowder thickens. Reduce the heat to medium-low and stir in the milk. Cook for 1 to 2 minutes and then stir in the heavy cream. Simmer, stirring constantly, for 5 minutes; do not boil. Add the remaining tablespoon of butter to the pot, and serve the chowder in soup bowls with oyster crackers.

Salt and pepper Olive oil 1 medium sweet onion, finely chopped 4 strips of thick-cut bacon, chopped 1 tablespoon flour 1 cup of whole milk 1 cup heavy cream

Classics major Sara Sheehy Finnerty ’93 was living in East Aurora, New York, when she learned of an antique food trailer for sale, which she and her husband, James Finnerty ’92, quickly bought and fixed up. After sixteen years as a stay-at-home mom and with previous experience running restaurants in Boston, Sara returned to her New England culinary roots and perfected the menu for The Maine Bite, a food truck she operates seasonally in western New York.

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Forward

The outer envelope of a letter received by Donald MacMillan in 1913 reads, “To be opened when everything’s gone dead wrong.” Hand-delivered, no one knows who sent it. What is contained in the letter is also a mystery—MacMillan never opened it and, so far at least, no one else has either.

There are few things more iconic and beautiful in the Arctic than icebergs—and people sure take photos of them. The museum has more than 2,400 iceberg photographs!

Museum visitors love the narwhal tusk (which is actually a really long spiral tooth), and some visitors are surprised to learn that narwhals are real.

Since narwhals never have been successfully kept in captivity, you can only see them in Arctic waters where they live.

Did You Know?

All Things Arctic The Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum is a wonderland of history and culture of the north.

Illustration by Kelsey Oseid NAMED AFTER Bowdoin’s famous explorers Robert E. Peary

(Class of 1877) and Donald B. MacMillan (Class of 1898), the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum is a world-renowned research and educational resource dedicated to all things Arctic. With warming temperatures threatening the environment on which northern residents and Arctic-adapted animals and plants depend, the region needs creative, resourceful, and intellectually nimble leaders. The museum and Arctic Studies Center, which will soon be housed in the new John and Lile Gibbons Center for Arctic Studies, are training students to be those leaders—using their research and collections and drawing upon their longstanding relationships with Arctic communities and the north.

To read about the John and Lile Gibbons Center for Arctic Studies, visit bowdo.in/jlgcas.

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The narwhal tusk may be one of the museum’s most popular objects, but the walrus in the museum has an actual name— the taxidermist who worked on him, Novio Bertrand, called him Oscar.

Many of the museum’s collections are related. For example, the museum has a photograph of MacMillan on the deck of the schooner Bowdoin, huddled with others around a wire voice recorder.

The collection includes the recorder, the recording of the Inuit song they were making, and journal entries describing the experience.

Bowdoin has been sending students and faculty to the Arctic since 1860, when Professor Paul Chadbourne led a trip that included student Alpheus Spring Packard Jr. Packard would become an entomologist who named more than 500 new species—including seven spiders discovered in Labrador, Canada. One of them, Aculpeira packardi, is named for Packard.

The oldest object in the museum collection—a kayak purchased in Labrador in 1891—was the inspiration for the newest. Inuit kayak builder Noah Nochasak constructed a replica with local builder Fred Randall, as the centerpiece of the museum’s Kajak! exhibition.

The sun’s reflection on the Arctic’s white surfaces can cause painful snowblindness.

The museum’s collection includes Inuit-made snow goggles fashioned from wood, bone, or antler, as well as goggles made out of metal and glass introduced by American expeditions.

Not everything in the museum is old. The significant and growing collection of contemporary Inuit art includes a large number of beautifully woven Alaskan baleen baskets.

In the brief northern summer, the tundra comes alive with beautiful, tiny, flowering plants, documented in the museum’s collection of pressed flowers from the 1920s. Some Arctic plants bloom before all the snow is melted, and many keep right at it until the snow flies again in the fall.

Forward

On View

Spanning the Centuries in Africa Online exhibition highlights social themes in Central and West African art.

THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST: Art from Central and West Africa, running until October 3, 2021, was the Bowdoin College Museum of Art’s first in-person casualty of the pandemic. Originally due to go on public view in late March 2020, the museum shifted the show to a virtual venue and now looks forward to sharing it in person as soon as the museum can safely reopen.

“This shift has enabled us to share electronically an exceptional range of objects, drawn both from the long-term loan of the Wyvern Collection and the museum’s own holdings,” says codirector Anne Goodyear. The show highlights how the arts of Central and West Africa represent social themes across time, placing historic art alongside works made in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Furthermore, explains Goodyear, this exhibition was developed in coordination with Professor of History David Gordon and students from his fall 2019 course The Powers of Central African Art. “We greatly admire the innovative scholarship on the part of Professor Gordon and his class that made this project possible,” she says, “and we are grateful for the innovative collaboration with our colleagues in information technology that made it possible to share this project with audiences virtually.”

Bamiléké Yegué Scream Mask, an element of the Two-Faced/Double Visage Faces of Mask series, 2015–2017, wood, hair, beads, hide, pigment, and cloth, by Hervé Youmbi, Cameroonian, born 1973.

Museum Purchase, Lloyd O. and Marjorie Strong Coulter Fund.

Bowdoin College Museum of Art. ©Hervé Youmbi.

View the exhibition online at bowdoin.edu/art-museum.

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PHOTO: LUC DEMERS

Student Life

On the Shelf Beneficence MEREDITH HALL ’93

(Godine, 2020) “If the word ‘luminous’ didn’t already exist, you’d have to invent it to describe Meredith Hall’s radiant new novel,” gushes Pulitzer prize–winning author Richard Russo. Best-selling memoirist Hall’s first novel follows the Senter family of fictional Alstead, Maine, as they overcome heartbreak to reclaim goodness and peace in their lives.

Getting in Shape for the Real World Sophomore Bootcamp is on a roll. This year, the third annual career-building workshop attracted 325 sophomores—145 more than last year, and 307 more than its pilot year in 2018.

Career Exploration and Development (CXD) is getting closer to its goal of including every sophomore in its weeklong program. The free workshop teaches students how to seek out job and internship opportunities; how to write winning résumés, cover letters, and outreach emails; and how to use networks like Bowdoin’s alumni and LinkedIn to make professional connections. The program is also a space for the sophomore class to bond in a shared experience, said CXD Executive Director Kristin Brennan.

This year, due to COVID-19 safety protocols, the six-day workshop was held virtually. The benefit of this, according to Bootcamp organizer and CXD Associate Director of Skill Development and Programming Bethany Walsh, was that many more alumni—320—were able to be involved. “They participated from all around the world,” she said.

Each of the alumni met one-on-one with two students to give them a chance to practice networking. In post-Bootcamp surveys, many alumni were enthusiastic about the experience.

“Just lovely to chat with a bright and thoughtful young person who has their whole future ahead of them. Makes me feel good about the future, Bowdoin, and that I might be a bit of help to someone else,” one alumna wrote.

Many students, too, reported feeling positively about connecting with alumni and their classmates, and for completing the program with working documents in hand. According to one student, “I really appreciated the process of writing a résumé and having it read by a peer as well as by my team leader. This is not something I had ever done before.”

A Field Guide to Gifted Students: A Teacher’s Introduction to Identifying and Meeting the Needs of Gifted Learners

No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention REED HASTINGS ’83

CHARLOTTE AGELL ’81

and Erin Meyer

and Molly Kellogg

(Penguin Press, 2020)

(Prufrock Press, 2020)

Wisdom’s Friendly Heart: Augustinian Hope for Skeptics and Conspiracy Theorists

Deep Kindness: A Revolutionary Guide for the Way We Think, Talk, and Act in Kindness

JENNIFER HOCKENBERY ’93

HOUSTON KRAFT ’11

(Cascade Books, 2020)

(Tiller Press, 2020)

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Forward Sustainability

Campus Life

Hot and Cold Passive house design leads the way.

WHILE THE COLLEGE works toward maintaining its carbon-

neutral status, it is important to ensure that any new square footage added to the campus is as energy efficient as possible. Utilizing passive house design has helped Bowdoin achieve that goal with relatively recent construction projects, including the Park Row Apartments, Harpswell Apartments, and the Schiller Coastal Studies Center.

Passive house design can be thought of like a superinsulated leakproof thermos versus a glass coffee carafe: the super-insulated walls and continuous air barrier around the coffee allows the contents to stay warm—or cool, depending on the season—without added energy, unlike the glass carafe, which must be warmed by an external source to maintain temperature.

Bowdoin has used the Passive House Institute’s building standards that focus on a super-thick layer of continuous insulation around the building, triple-pane windows, highperformance doors, and a ventilation system that recovers heat during the ventilation air exchange. The results? By way of example, the energy modeling for the Park Row Apartments predicts a 72 percent heat savings and an overall 54 percent reduction in energy use.

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SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP The campus club Bowdoin Innovation and Entrepreneurship (BIE) organized an extracurricular program for enterprising, idealistic students in February to help turn fledgling ideas into businesses with a purpose beyond financial success.

The five-week program, “Capitalism for the Common Good,” began February 15. It’s grounded in the notion that making profits can be—and should be—good for people and the planet. Calvin Kinghorn ’21, leader of BIE, has been working on developing the incubation program for months.

“Everyone in [BIE], we all love the ‘Offer of the College,’” he said, “and our goal is to have businesses that focus on social entrepreneurship and building purpose-based markets.”

A handful of alumni with backgrounds in entrepreneurship, consulting, or venture capital will serve as instructors for the program, including Jeremy Litchfield ’99 and his wife, Rebecca Darr, who both founded the sustainable clothing company Atayne. Litchfield and Darr are also the club’s advisors.

The approximately thirty-five students signed up for “Capitalism for the Common Good” are not expected to come in with a specific concept for a business, Kinghorn said, “just a desire to learn, collaborate, and develop ideas to drive positive change in the world.” In fact, rather than coming in with a specific company in mind, he has asked participants to think about problems and issues they’d like to solve.

BIE member Cassidy Donohue ’21 says she believes her generation is determined to creatively address the world’s challenges. “Doing harm is not okay anymore,” she said. “We have to find a way to be more thoughtful for those who come after us.”

ILLUSTRATION: BRIAN STAUFFER

Wellness

Being Here Now With the spring semester underway in stressful and sometimes isolating circumstances, self-care is an important topic for students, faculty, and staff alike. In coordination with Bowdoin’s counseling department, peer health, Bowdoin Outing Club (BOC), and the Sexuality, Women, and Gender Center (SWAG), “we’re starting with a basket of potential,” said Assistant Director of Wellness Services Kate Nicholson. “The primary element of our offerings is connection and community, a baseline for mental health.” Wellness collaborations include in-person yoga classes; partnerships with apps like Down Dog and Ten Percent; a community book reading of The Body Is Not an Apology, by Sonya Renee Taylor, and a campus visit by the author; a first-year wellness collective; peer-facilitated student groups like Project Connect, the Bowdoin chapter of Active Minds, and the meditation club Mindfulness Over Matter; BOC-led mini-retreats at the Schiller Coastal Studies Center; and ongoing cross-campus conversations on loneliness and belonging.

Follow Bowdoin Wellness on Instagram at @bwellbowdoin.

PHOTO: BRIAN WEDGE ’97

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Forward Alumni Life

Righting Wrongs Two Bowdoin alumni shine a spotlight on wrongful convictions.

BARBARA O’BRIEN ’93 AND KEN OTTERBOURG ’83 are on a

mission to document the failures of the American justice system. They both work at the National Registry of Exonerations, a collaboration among higher-education institutions that tracks wrongful convictions.

“We cannot fix the problems of our criminal justice system unless we document its failures and tell the stories of the people it’s wronged,” says O’Brien, who is editor of the registry and a law professor at Michigan State University.

“Wrongful convictions are, of course, only one marker of those problems, but they offer a critical window into criminal justice failures, and it’s important to share that knowledge.”

“Our research allows for wrongful convictions to be studied as public policy issues rather than just horrific anecdotes,” says Otterbourg, a journalist who has written widely about the issue. “I didn’t know much about the registry team when I applied for a job there, but I smiled when I learned Barb had gone to Bowdoin—not for any insider status on hiring, but because I knew she shared my values on the importance of collaboration and the challenges of searching for truth in a complex world.”

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ILLUSTRATION: HARRY CAMPBELL; PHOTO: FRED FIELD

Faculty

Putting a Dent in Political Polarization

LIGHTHOUSE A warm sun lit the newly expanded Schiller Coastal Studies Center, which recently opened and was ready for the spring semester after nineteen months of construction.

The updated center includes a new dry lab with teaching and research spaces; a Living and Learning Building for classes, conferences, and dining; and four residential cabins—all made possible through a $10 million gift from trustee Philip Schiller P’17 and his wife, Kim Gassett-Schiller P’17.

For a video tour of the new facility, visit bowdo.in/scsc.

Bowdoin economics professor Dan Stone wants people to stray from the comfortable information silos that tend to entrench their political beliefs—like the less balanced cable news shows, familiar news sites, or addictive social media platforms—to try seeing the world from a different angle.

He’s worked on several research papers on polarization and media and even launched an “anti-polarization” project at Bowdoin—the Purple Media Plunge. Now he’s working on a similar but more ambitious venture called Media Trades. An interactive website, Media Trades encourages leftand right-leaning users to swap articles they think present convincing arguments. The incentive for participants, Stone says, is the chance to persuade others to accept the validity of their own beliefs.

This fall, Stone collaborated with a graduate economics instructor at Clemson University in South Carolina to engage her eighty mostly conservative students with Media Trades. Stone surveyed the Clemson students before and after they used the site for two weeks.

“In terms of the data, what jumped out is that students enjoyed the trades more than they

expected,” Stone said. “There was also evidence it reduced polarization a bit.” Some students who scored high on a polarization measure before the exercise reported scores reduced by an average of 5.7 points after it concluded.

This spring, Stone will collaborate with a different group of Clemson students. He’s also partnering with government professor Michael Franz’s political statistics class at Bowdoin. This way, students from the two campuses will swap articles with one another. “They’ll be trading across the country, across regions, and across types of schools,” Stone said.

While he is working on a book about polarization from a behavioral economist’s viewpoint, Stone said his desire to have students use Media Trades and collect data stems from a personal mission to help make peace.

“Polarization is a solvable problem,” he said.

“A lot of it boils down to people not understanding one another. I am optimistic that we can do better, and that it would lead to real improvements for the country and the world.”

Above: Shown here in January 2020, Dan Stone (left) developed Media Trades in collaboration with economics major Jackson Harrower ’20 (middle) and Bowdoin’s senior interactive developer David Francis (right).

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Forward

13.8

36.3

200,000 One-year increase in the number of meals delivered by the Midcoast Hunger Prevention Program, up from 415,000 in 2019 to 615,000 in 2020.

452

Percentage increase in the median sale price of a home in Maine, which in 2020 hit an all-time statewide high of $256,000.

Percentage of Maine home sales in November 2020 that were to out-of-state residents.

In November 2019 it was 26 percent.

41

3

Number of new downtown restaurants that opened in 2020 (Bay Bowls, Embark, Maine St. Steak & Oyster).

Number of years that Gulf of Maine Books has been open. “This was the hardest year we’ve had,” said owner Gary Lawless.

Number of Brunswick businesses that received Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans in 2020. They ranged from $2,735,800 to the SaviLinx call center to $685 to a sole proprietor seafood dealer and total $14,581,469.

By the Numbers

Around Town As businesses and individuals struggle to adjust to the new normal of the coronavirus pandemic, they have made some quantifiable changes in behavior. Here are some instructive numbers from Brunswick that suggest everyone needs a little help; what many people are reading now that movies, theaters, and concerts are on hold; and that Maine is becoming a popular full-time destination for people fleeing cities in other states.

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125

Number of copies of A Promised Land, by Barack Obama, sold at Gulf of Maine Books, the shop’s bestselling title since it went curbside sales only.

95

Number of Hannaford To Go curbside pickups each day at the Brunswick supermarket.

3

Number of downtown restaurants that closed in 2020 (Benchwarmer’s Sports Pub, Henry and Marty, Pedro O’Hara’s).

14,000 Number of trips outside that Curtis Memorial Library staff made between June and January to deliver books for curbside pickup.

Academics Sound Bite

Agents of Change Bowdoin has introduced plans to update one of its distribution requirements to better help students understand and analyze structures of privilege and inequality.

THE COLLEGE REQUIRES students to complete at least one full-credit course in each of five distribution areas: Mathematical, Computational, or Statistical Reasoning; Inquiry in the Natural Sciences; International Perspectives; Visual and Performing Arts; and Exploring Social Differences (ESD). This past fall, faculty approved a revision to the current ESD requirement and renamed it Difference, Power, and Inequity (DPI).

Phased in over the next two years, DPI courses will help students examine structures of privilege and inequality and how these structures affect their own experiences.

Senior Vice President and Dean for Academic Affairs Jennifer Scanlon says that the transition to a focus “on difference, power, and inequity is part of our ongoing and necessary work on race and racism and signals our collective responsibility to shift from awareness to active anti-racist practices. It also shifts the College in a significant way from merely exposing students to differences to enabling them to engage their worlds and each other with greater respect, skill, and understanding.”

“From its inception, Bowdoin has understood the value of preparing students to be engaged citizens and responsible agents of change,” wrote the Curriculum and Educational Policy Committee in its proposal to faculty, citing the inaugural address of President Joseph McKeen in 1802. McKeen described how the hallmark of a liberal arts education is “founded and endowed for the common good,” so that students are not “enabled to pass through life in an easy or reputable manner, but that their mental powers may be cultivated and improved for the benefit of society.”

PHOTO: MICHELE STAPLETON; ILLUSTRATION: MICHAEL MORGENSTERN

“I started out as a phone volunteer, and now I am a member of Congress. I don’t have rich parents.

I didn’t have a savings account when I decided to run. No matter what it takes, we owe it to our people and our fellow human beings to be the best we can be and to work as hard as we can to move our communities forward.”

—NEW MEXICO CONGRESSWOMAN DEB HAALAND DURING A NOVEMBER 2020 DISCUSSION HOSTED BY THE NATIVE AMERICAN STUDENT ASSOCIATION AND BOWDOIN OUTING CLUB TO COMMEMORATE NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY MONTH. HAALAND IS ONE OF THE FIRST TWO NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN TO HAVE SERVED IN THE US HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES. SHE HAS BEEN NOMINATED TO SERVE AS US SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR.

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Forward On Stage

Athletics

Reading Time The Bowdoin College Library aims to “delight, intrigue, comfort, and cheer you through these winter months”—according to Associate Librarian for Research, Instruction, and Outreach Erin Valentino—with “Read to Me,” a series of weekly readings of poetry, stories, artist’s books, and more by library staff and others. “I was inspired by Roland Mendiola’s [interim director of counseling and wellness services] discussion of hope, connection, and empowerment as habits of mind that we need to encourage in students. I was thinking about, how every time I walk past the children’s book collection in the library, how cool it would be to have a story circle for adults, because having someone read to you is very comforting. That’s where I’m coming from intuitively—we can’t do it in person, but hopefully it will bring some warmth and comfort to our community.”

Would you like to hear a story? Join the readers and listen in on Instagram (@bowdoinlibrary), Facebook (Bowdoin College Library), or Twitter (@bowdoinlibrary). You can also catch past readings online at bowdo.in/read-to-me.

Renae Anderson ’21, in her Team USA uniform, skiing a practice run at the Junior FIS Cross-Country World Championships in Vuokatti, Finland.

Freestyling Finland With a strong early-season kick, Bowdoin Nordic skier Renae Anderson ’21 earned a spot on the United States Junior National Team that competed at the Junior FIS Cross-Country World Championships, February 8–14, in Vuokatti, Finland. She competed in the U23 [under 23] women’s 10K freestyle event, and placed forty-sixth overall in a time of 32:21.5.

Anderson, who has taken the academic year off, has been at home in Minnesota working for the Loppet Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on outdoor adventure experiences for underserved youth and families in the Minneapolis area, and racing with her hometown club, Loppet Nordic Racing.

“It’s my last year in the U23 age group,” Anderson said, “so I kept motivated this fall by training with the stretch-goal of qualifying for Worlds in the back of my mind. I ended up feeling great and having some of my best races yet—qualifying me to race in Finland!”

“This is such a well-earned honor for Renae—she’s been working hard for years and has come such a long way since she started at Bowdoin,” said Polar Bear head Nordic ski coach Nathan Alsobrook ’97. “It’s an exciting milestone for our whole team as well—when you see a teammate succeed at an elite level, it gives everyone a wonderful sense of possibility.”

Through her first three years at Bowdoin, Anderson established herself as one of the top collegiate skiers in the nation, becoming the first women’s Nordic skier in Bowdoin history to qualify for three NCAA Championships.

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ILLUSTRATION: ANNA & ELENA BALBUSSO; PHOTO: ANDY NEWELL

Campaign

Courses

Teaching COVID During any given semester, courses are presented that address current events head-on in a myriad of ways across disciplines. This holds true in light of the global COVID-19 pandemic, as evidenced by three new curricular offerings.

BIOETHICS Sarah Conly, Professor of Philosophy The course takes a look at some of the central ethical issues that have long faced the medical community, like inequality in health care and how much pharmaceutical companies should charge for essential drugs. Professor Sarah Conly explores how these issues are impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“For example,” she says, “we study the ethics of drug trials and the testing of new medicines on human subjects.”

GOING VIRAL: THE CINEMA OF PANDEMICS Shu-chin Tsui, Bowdoin Chair in Asian Studies “The coronavirus causing COVID-19 is novel, but pandemics are not,” says Professor Shu-chin Tsui. “By considering how past pandemics have been represented in more than a dozen films across the world, we gain insight into how others have experienced deadly disease, which could help us to see our own struggle with COVID in a new light.”

RACIAL AND ETHNIC DISPARITIES Hakim Zainiddinov, Postdoctoral Fellow in Sociology This course explores the complex nature of racial/ethnic health disparities in the US. Part of the class is devoted to the pandemic, says Hakim Zainiddinov. “We’re looking at how COVID-19 has produced vastly disproportionate deaths among minority groups and how the pandemic has elevated anxiety among Asian Americans due to the increase of hate crimes against them during the pandemic.”

PHOTO: (HUBBARD HALL) MICHELE STAPLETON

COMING TOGETHER Last holiday season, alumni were encouraged to “whip up a favorite Bowdoin treat, sit back, relax, and celebrate the season” with a virtual event hosted by Emmy-winner and Alumni Council president Matt Roberts ’93 that featured performances by more than a dozen fellow alumni and campus community members. It was more than holiday spirit that counted—474 alumni registered for the event and that participation helped the College toward an important goal. A campaign’s progress is always measured in dollars—Bowdoin’s is also measured in loyalty, participation, and “generous enthusiasm.”

Our From Here comprehensive campaign includes a goal of 85 percent of alumni engaging with the College by making a gift, volunteering, or registering for an event.

Alumni involvement enriches the community with ideas and viewpoints, creates closer bonds, expands the reach and impact of the Bowdoin network, and supports the College in ways that complement priorities of financial aid, comprehensive aid, the academic program, career exploration and development, and annual giving. In the case of the holiday event, it was heartwarming, impressive, and a lot of fun.

Watch a recording of the holiday event at vimeo.com/492523213 (password: Holiday2020).

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Column

Reaching Claudia Villar-Leeman ’15 wonders at friendship, temporality, and hope as she remembers her friend Elizabeth Brown ’15.

HER DIRTY BLONDE HAIR pulled back under her

St. Louis Cardinals cap, Elizabeth kneeled in the damp underbrush. The kneepads of her pants made indentations in the dirt. She leaned forward, rain boots tucked beneath her, lips tight with concentration. Streaks of brown marked her cheeks. Her arm was invisible, swallowed by the mossy earth as she pressed her shoulder against the entrance to a tiny tunnel.

I could imagine her fingers stretching, reaching.

Suddenly, a small “Oh!” escaped her—her furrowed brow instantly relaxing as a smile spread across her face. She scooted back, her biceps and then forearm reappearing inch by inch, striped brown and pink. At last, her hand emerged.

Gently pressed between her thumb and index finger was the jet-black bill of a storm-petrel chick—a snowball of pudginess concealed by fine gray down. Elizabeth cupped the small life in her hands, bringing him so close to our faces we could smell the forest and the ocean. The chick’s black eyes were barely visible beneath the wispy down, but he and Elizabeth made eye contact. The chick observed her calmly.

Just days old, this particular storm-petrel had not met a human before, but his gaze seemed expectant. Perhaps memories of human interaction had been passed down by his parents.

People had been handling the storm-petrels

of the Kent Island colony for decades—since Chuck Huntington established the long-term monitoring study of these remarkable pelagic birds in 1955. Indeed, the Leach’s storm-petrel study is one of the longest-running studies of any wild population of animals in the world.

That morning, Elizabeth and I woke early, donned our knee-high boots and crinkly invincible pants, and trudged through the marsh to a mossy patch of seaside forest Huntington dubbed “the Shire.” We visited hundreds of petrel burrows, as we did every morning, monitoring who had come home after some time away, who had laid an egg, who had gained some weight, who was in a burrow they didn’t usually sleep in. It was very personal business.

We made a point to be as polite as possible, apologizing to each bird for our intrusions.

Granted, our attentiveness to the emotional well-being of the birds did not stand in the way of our efficiency. We drew out maps of the 400 or so burrows and planned a path that would allow us to visit all of them in the shortest amount of time. By week six, we had it down to a science. On good days, we’d be done with our monitoring duties by lunchtime. That left us the afternoons for long walks along the shoreline.

We peered into tidepools to watch battles between dog whelks and barnacles. We filled our pockets with noteworthy rocks and marveled

“Hope is grounded in our being, in our character and calling, not in some expected outcome. There may not be a reason to be optimistic, but we will be anyway.”

—CLIMATE ACTIVIST PER ESPEN STOKNES

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together at the pace of geological time. We napped on sun-warmed boulders, triumphing in our harmony with the surrounding colony of sleeping gulls. We paid tribute to the dried carcasses of harbor seal pups and ruminated about the finality of death. We stared at a twitching speckled egg for an hour so we could welcome the miracle of life.

In the evenings, after dinner in the communal mess hall, we would make our way home to the lower lab, our silhouettes enveloped by the purple summer dusk. The small wooden hut was so close to the tidal marsh at the edge of the island that during spring tides the water came right up to the door. The lab’s first floor was filled with scientific knick-knacks— bleached skulls, salty microscopes, an assortment of rusted tools. In the loft above, our sleeping bags were laid out on narrow wooden platforms. The attic window between our beds looked out over the marsh. Each evening we fell asleep to an eerie chorus of petrels.

We were sleeping on a speck of land not two miles long, surrounded by the Bay of Fundy, renowned for the largest tides in the world.

We felt minuscule and infinite.

NO MATTER HOW FAR AWAY we felt from civilization, the human struggle had a way of finding us. We saw it in the plastic washed up on shore; in the satellites Elizabeth traced with a finger as we lay on the dock; in the decades of storm-petrel data collected by students like us. Hatching success was deteriorating.

Populations were dwindling. Biodiversity was in decline. And the petrels of Kent Island were not alone.

We knew climate change was shifting the ground beneath the feet, fins, and roots of millions of species. We knew that humanity had never faced a more significant existential crisis.

We knew that historically marginalized people would be hit first and hardest.

That fall, Elizabeth and I returned to Brunswick and were pulled back into the life of undergraduate studies. We fell into our separate social spheres. We found our way back to each other in an ornithology class, memorizing bird calls and taxonomy on long walks. We visited the Yale School of Forestry and dreamed of

Lit from within: A warm glow emanates from the windows of the warden’s house (foreground) and the dorm (background) as evening descends on the Bowdoin Scientific Station on Kent Island in the Bay of Fundy.

graduate studies and tackling climate change and fighting injustice and traveling the world.

Our paths separated, reconnected, and separated again. One evening, a few years after we graduated, my phone buzzed. The speech bubble contained words I couldn’t understand.

I heard Elizabeth Brown died.

I blinked.

I heard Elizabeth Brown died.

I buckled.

Died. What a strange word. Short. Unexpected.

Like a game of sharks and minnows, where even the speediest fish can have the bad luck of not making it. A word filled with question marks and cliffhangers and what ifs. An irreversible, inevitable word.

PHOTO: FRED FIELD

She died in her sleep. The autopsy was inconclusive. At her funeral I learned she spent her last day in Shenandoah with her parents, pointing out pileated woodpeckers as they hiked together. I managed a smile through my tears.

THESE DAYS the news is filled with heaviness.

It can be hard to pull oneself out of the widening cavern of despair, sore from the jagged unfairness of it all.

And yet. From my fire escape, I see a redbellied woodpecker hop along a branch of the elm tree. The blue jays continue their amicable bickering. The squirrels bury their acorns. I watch men install solar panels on the building across from my own. I see a protester on a bike

with a colorful face mask, her fist raised. Small triumphs in the face of vast tragedies. I think of the fluffy petrel chick in Elizabeth’s hands.

In the words of climate activist Per Espen Stoknes, “Hope is grounded in our being, in our character and calling, not in some expected outcome. There may not be a reason to be optimistic, but we will be anyway.” The shining meaning of life reveals itself as love. We are minuscule. We are infinite. We continue to reach.

Claudia Villar-Leeman ’15 currently works as an energy policy advisor at the New York City Offices of Sustainability and Resiliency. She is pleased to find ample hiking and bird-watching in and around her hometown of New York City.

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Eleven months before the attack on Pearl Harbor forced the United States to enter World War II, President Roosevelt announced a bold plan to build two hundred new merchant ships that would supply Great Britain and the war effort. These were the first of the Liberty Ships, credited with turning the tide of the war and advancing the Allies to victory. In foot-tall letters across the bow of forty-three of these famous vessels were names that are familiar— alumni, board members, and other illustrious members of the Bowdoin community.

ON THE PROW OF LIBERTY

BY KATHRYN MILES

I

IN OCTOBER 1940, the world was at war. Poland and much of Scandinavia had fallen to Germany. France and England were both under siege as well. Having faced catastrophic naval losses at the hands of the Nazis, Britain feared a total collapse. As a last-ditch effort, a delegation of British shipbuilders, surveyors, and members of the admiralty arrived in the US with one desperate mission: to find a shipyard capable of building sixty merchant vessels that could continue the Allies’ fight. It would not be an easy battle. The empire’s commercial fleet had sustained catastrophic losses during World War I; the global Great Depression had stymied that fleet’s recovery. Now, just a year into the second World War, Britain was facing immeasurable odds. Squadrons of German U-boat submarines known as “wolf packs” were laying siege on the almost entirely unprotected merchant fleet and threatened to collapse the empire’s economy, leaving millions of people without basic goods and supplies.

Once in the US, the British shipbuilding delegation—known colloquially as “the Mission”—met with high-ranking members of the US Maritime Commission and received permission to contract with boatyards here.

They chartered a commercial plane and spent three weeks barnstorming the continent, searching for a company capable of building the 7,463-ton ships.

In the end, they found three: The Henry J. Kaiser Company, a steel and paving company that had recently completed work on the Hoover and Grand Coulee Dams; New York-based Todd Shipyards; and Maine’s Bath Iron Works (BIW), which was founded in 1884 by Bowdoin alumnus Thomas Hyde, Class of 1861. Todd and BIW already had extensive experience building large ships; Kaiser, while not a shipbuilder, brought revolutionary techniques in welding and prefabricated metals. Collectively, they established two new yards: the Todd-California Shipbuilding Corporation, in Richmond, California, and Todd-Bath Iron Shipbuilding Corporation, located in South Portland, Maine.

Each of these two yards was responsible for building thirty of the British merchant ships.

Construction began in December 1940. By then, the United States had come to understand

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its own merchant vessel crisis. Most of the American ships had been built in the years leading up to World War I. By 1940, they were antiquated and in bad repair. And while the US had managed to stay out of the war to that point, the country was facing increased shipping demands as a result of fighting overseas, which was proving all too starkly the insufficiencies of the US merchant fleet.

On January 3, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced a $350 million plan to build two hundred new merchant ships based on the design of the sixty British vessels. Officially designated as part of the emergency cargo class, they were given the more popular moniker of Liberty Ships, a nod to Patrick Henry’s fiery speech on the eve of the Revolutionary War.

Like their British counterparts, Liberty Ships would be built based on Kaiser’s innovations in prefabrication: subassemblies would be constructed at factories around the country and then shipped by rail to yards like Todd-Bath Iron.

“It was the realization of a concept shipbuilders had been dreaming about for decades,” said Josh Smith, associate professor of history at the US Merchant Marine Academy and director of the American Merchant Marine Museum. “This idea of building components in separate facilities and bringing them together to assemble quickly really was revolutionary.”

Nevertheless, President Roosevelt was famously no fan of their design. He called them “dreadful looking objects.” Time magazine agreed, dubbing them “ugly ducklings.” But

what the vessels may have lacked in aesthetics they more than compensated for in functionality.

Their design included five cargo holds capable of carrying 7,800 tons of supplies—the equivalent of about a mile and a half of railroad boxcars. They were propelled by 2,500-horsepower steam engines and armed with both antiaircraft and submarine fighting guns.

“Liberty Ships weren’t about being the best or the most modern,” said Smith. “It was about reducing construction and design to their most simple forms, so that they could be replicated again and again, and by workers without previous shipbuilding experience.”

Instead of using more traditional riveted fastenings, Liberty Ship components were welded together, which made the ships less

time-consuming to complete, said Smith.

Welding, he added, was also much easier to teach to workers new to the trade; it also required less upper body strength, which meant that a greater cross section of workers—including women—could undertake it.

Approximately 1.8 million Americans were employed in Liberty shipyards during the war.

Yard owners touted equal hiring practices.

Some payrolls comprised as many as 50 percent Black workers and 10 percent women. Henry Kaiser provided childcare and health insurance for his employees (indeed, the contemporary health care consortium Kaiser Permanente would grow out of these practices). But, said Smith, working conditions were far from egalitarian in most yards. Women and minority

Above left: Five British Ocean class cargo ships, precursors to the Liberty Ships, at the Todd-Bath Iron Shipbuilding yard in South Portland, Maine, on August 16, 1942. These five ships, part of the original sixty commissioned by “the Mission,” were all launched on the same day.

Above right: Welder-trainee Josie Lucille Owens works on the Liberty Ship SS George Washington Carver at the Kaiser shipyards in Richmond, California, in 1943.

Opening spread: The SS Joseph N. Teal ready to launch on September 13, 1942. The Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation set a record, building the Teal in just ten days, a feat bested by almost six days by Kaiser shipyards with the Peary two months later.

PHOTOS: (TODD-BATH) ALBERT FREEMAN, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; (WELDER) E. F. JOSEPH, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; (OPENING SPREAD, SS JOSEPH N. TEAL) NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

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Bowdoin Connections Of the 2,710 Liberty Ships built during World War II, forty-three were named after people with Bowdoin connections, including alumni, honorary degree recipients, overseers, and trustees. Here are some of them.

James G. Blaine H’1884 Overseer, 1866–1873. Represented Maine in the US House of Representatives, served as Speaker of the House of Representatives, was a US senator, and served twice as US secretary of state.

James Bowdoin College namesake. Second governor of Massachusetts. One of many cofounders, including John Adams and John Hancock, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Joshua L. Chamberlain, Class of 1852, H’1869 President of the College, 1871–1883. Trustee, 1867–1914. Left his Bowdoin professorship to lead the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment, received the Congressional Medal of Honor for the defense of Little Round Top at Gettysburg, and accepted the surrender of the Confederate troops at Appomattox. After the war, he served as governor of Maine from 1867 to 1871.

Henry Dearborn Overseer, 1794–1798. Served under Benedict Arnold in the expedition to Québec (of which his journal is an important historical record). He was US secretary of war under President Jefferson and a general in the War of 1812.

William Pitt Fessenden, Class of 1823, H’1858 Overseer, 1843–1860. Trustee, 1860–1869.

Maine legislator, member of the US House of Representatives, US senator from Maine, and Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury from 1864 to 1865.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Class of 1825 Author of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, among others. Appointed US consul in Liverpool, England, by President Franklin Pierce (Class of 1824).

William DeWitt Hyde H’1886, H’1917 President of the College, 1885–1917. Served as a minister prior to his post as Bowdoin president and professor of mental and moral philosophy. As president, he enlarged the faculty, revolutionized the curriculum, and oversaw the construction of the Walker Art Building, Searles Science Building, Hubbard Hall, and Sargent Gym. Thomas W. Hyde, Class of 1861 Civil War brigadier general from Bath, Maine, and Congressional Medal of Honor recipient for his role at the Battle of Antietam. A three-term Maine state senator and two-time mayor of Bath, he was founder and president of Bath Iron Works.

Sumner I. Kimball, Class of 1855, H’1891 In charge of the Revenue Marine Bureau in the US Department of the Treasury, he founded the United States Life-Saving Service, a precursor to the US Coast Guard, and served as its superintendent for thirty-seven years.

Henry W. Longfellow, Class of 1825, H’1874 Bowdoin professor of modern languages and librarian of the College from 1829 to 1835.

One of the most well-known poets of all time, he is remembered for such poems as “The Song of Hiawatha,” “Paul Revere’s Ride,” and “The Courtship of Miles Standish.”

Robert E. Peary, Class of 1877, H’1894, H’1910 Served in the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey and the United States Navy, rising to the rank of rear admiral. Best known as the Arctic explorer who discovered the North Pole in 1909.

Thomas B. Reed, Class of 1860, H’1890 Served in the Maine House of Representatives and Maine Senate, as Maine Attorney General, as US Representative for Maine’s First Congressional District, and as US Speaker of the House.

Harriet Beecher Stowe The famous abolitionist and author came to Brunswick in 1850 with her husband, Bowdoin alumnus and religion professor Calvin Stowe (Class of 1824). She wrote much of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Calvin’s Appleton Hall office and at their home at 63 Federal Street.

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workers were often relegated to the most menial of jobs and rarely received the same wages as their white male counterparts. Race riots at Southern yards were often prompted by white workers, and in some cases led to the murder of Black yard workers.

“It definitely wasn’t always the idealized Rosie the Riveter image,” said Smith. “And many women and minority employees were let go after the war. But these yards at least paved the way for more equality in the workplace nationwide.”

LIBERTY SHIPS WERE PRIZED for their versatility,

but it was the speed at which they were constructed that made them revolutionary.

Each ship in the first generation of Liberty Ships took more than two hundred days to complete. By 1942, when the US was firmly entrenched in the war, workers had reduced that time to about seventy days per ship and were launching, on average, about three each day—a Herculean feat by any standard.

At that same time, South Portland, Maine, had become a hub for Liberty Ship construction. Todd-Bath Iron, having finished with the British contract, began work on American ships as well. It was soon joined by the New England Shipbuilding Corporation.

Known to locals as the East and West Yards, respectively, this conglomeration of yards appeared from Casco Bay a veritable monolith of cranes, sliding ways, and watertight basins.

Towers of scaffolding enveloped ships, and a Byzantine collection of warehouses and outbuildings filled the area surrounding what is now Bug Light Park, said Kathryn DiPhilippo, executive director and curator for the South Portland Historical Society.

“Over 30,000 workers here were employed in twenty-four-hour construction every day of the week,” said DiPhilippo. “It was never not busy.”

Fifteen additional shipyards across the United States and Canada operated at a similar rate. As workers increased the speed at which they completed the vessels, the US Maritime Commission struggled to name individual ships. How particular names were chosen has been largely lost to history, but DiPhilippo thinks that individual yards may have maintained suggestions from employees

The Liberty Ships SS Harriet Beecher Stowe and SS Charles W. Eliot are ready for launch at the East Yard, New England Shipbuilding Corporation, South Portland, Maine, on May 24, 1943.

and local elected officials, which were then forwarded to the national office.

Writers were a popular choice for ship monikers, and several chosen names had strong Bowdoin ties, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne (Class of 1825), and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Class of 1825). Other luminaries with Bowdoin connections, such as James Bowdoin, Joshua Chamberlain (Class of 1852), and William DeWitt Hyde, the College’s seventh president, were also chosen.

Launches of new vessels occurred so regularly that they often passed without much fanfare, said DiPhilippo. But there were exceptions.

When the SS William DeWitt Hyde was launched on August 31, 1943, it was christened in a

PHOTO: SOUTH PORTLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY

formal ceremony by Edith Lansing Sills, wife of then-president of the College Kenneth C. M. Sills. The couple was joined by a delegation of “some fifty Bowdoin men who are yard employees, together with their wives,” wrote the Lewiston Daily Sun, which covered the event.

No amount of fanfare in South Portland could rival that received by the launching of the SS Robert E. Peary, however. Peary, who graduated from Bowdoin in 1877 with a degree in civil engineering, made an international name for himself as an early Arctic explorer.

During World War II, his feats were memorialized in the naming of a naval SeaBee training facility (Camp Peary), and the USS Robert E. Peary, a naval destroyer escort christened by Peary’s widow, Josephine Diebitsch Peary, who

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Above left: The SS Robert E. Peary ready to launch at Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, California, on November 12, 1942. The Peary became famous for being assembled in a record four days, fifteen hours, and twenty-nine minutes, a promotional endeavor to showcase innovation and boost wartime morale.

Above right: Liberty Ships carrying guns, tanks, and planes in convoy across the Atlantic from the United States in 1942.

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had accompanied him on several of his polar expeditions. But it was the Liberty Ship Peary that would captivate the country.

In November 1942, employees of Kaiser’s Richmond, California, shipyard endeavored to break the existing speed record for assembly of a Liberty Ship. To do so, they first assembled the Peary’s some 250,000 parts into large sections weighing as much as 110 tons. At one minute past midnight on Sunday, November 8, workers laid the first piece of the Peary’s keel.

Hundreds of laborers toiled around the clock for the next four days. At 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, November 12, the assembled Peary launched to great fanfare, including an a cappella choir.

Its total assembly time was four days, fifteen hours, and twenty-nine minutes. And while the

ship would still require several days of outfitting before it was ready to sail, that assembly time had nonetheless shattered the existing record by more than five days.

Newspapers from Seattle to Oklahoma City to Boston carried news of the Peary’s record launch.

But officials at the Permanente Corporation were emphatic that the real accomplishment came from empowering its employees to innovate.

“We are not primarily trying to break records,” yard manager Clay Bedford told the United Press Association at the time. “Our main purpose has been experimenting in new prefabrication methods and, after receiving hundreds of valuable suggestions and time-saving inventions from our workers, we decided to try them all on one hull and see what would happen.”

THE SS PEARY was launched at a decisive moment in the war. That same month, just off the coast of the Solomon Islands, Allied forces were struggling against Japan in the Battle of Guadalcanal—what would eventually become one of the Allies’ first real victories in the Pacific.

Meanwhile, in Russia, European forces were struggling to beat back Nazi Germany in the Battle of Stalingrad, a protracted and particularly bloody engagement that would eventually give Allied troops an advantage in the European theater. Casualties were growing on both fronts, forcing the United States to drop its mandatory draft age from twenty-one to eighteen.

In countless ways, Liberty Ships supported these and other campaigns. It was a role especially fraught with danger. Liberty Ships were

notoriously slow, often making fewer than ten knots. They were most often deeply laden with cargo (a single Liberty Ship could carry as many as 2,840 Jeeps, 440 light tanks, or enough rations to feed sixteen million soldiers for a day). Crews comprised anywhere from thirty-eight to sixty-two civilian sailors, including bakers, able-bodied seamen, and carpenters. Down below, engine room workers were responsible for the continued maintenance of the ship’s power plant— smoke from a single engine could alert enemy combatants to a convoy’s location, and were a ship to fall out of that convoy, it would become easy prey to a German wolf pack. Convoys were under strict guidelines to keep smoke from emanating from the ships’ stacks while at sea, but wartime operating conditions made it extremely

PHOTOS: (SS ROBERT E. PEARY) LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; (CONVOY) LIBRARY OF CONGRESS/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

difficult to keep engines running well enough or to obtain consistent, clean-burning fuel to make that a reality. According to American Merchant Marine Museum statistics, of the approximately 250,000 merchant mariners who served during World War II, more than 9,000 lost their lives—a greater percentage than any of the four official armed service branches.

But the boon the ships gave to both Allied forces and civilians was profound. With a range of 20,000 nautical miles, Liberty Ships ferried troops to battles around the globe. They brought muchneeded humanitarian supplies to suffering communities. And they carried salvaged remnants of planes and other military wrecks from the front lines back to the United States, where they could be recycled and repurposed for other war efforts.

The approximately 2,700 vessels produced as American Liberty Ships were neither designed nor constructed with the idea that they would serve beyond the war, says Josh Smith. But those that survived often went on to serve long after their anticipated life expectancies. They carried pack mules and their army handlers to the Mediterranean during the Greek Civil War. They served as floating hospitals and aircraft repair shops. Some were recommissioned as mine sweepers, surveillance vessels, or cadet training ships. Others joined the National Defense Reserve Fleet, also known as the “mothball fleet,” where they were laid up in case of national emergencies.

However, most Liberty Ships—including at least five named after Bowdoin College figures— were entered into the merchant fleet, where they returned to their intended use as cargo vessels. For decades, they continued to ferry nearly every conceivable cargo, from cement and chemicals to vehicles and grain. Long after they too were removed from service, their legacy as one of America’s most potent weapons in World War II has remained an indelible part of international history.

Kathryn Miles is an award-winning journalist and author of four books, most recently Quakeland: On the Road to America’s Next Devastating Earthquake. Her essays and articles have appeared in publications including The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and Politico, among others.

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BY ALEX MARZANO-LESNEVICH ILLUSTRATIONS BY KEITH NEGLEY

Fueled by the Grappling Writing is notoriously hard. And writing about, as author Melissa Faliveno calls them, “spaces of uncertainty,” makes it even more so. In this conversation, Faliveno talks with Bowdoin professor and writer Alex Marzano-Lesnevich about the struggle—and the satisfaction—that comes from the process of interrogating our obsessions and each other, and of writing our way in the world through stories.

IN FALL 2020, as the country was gripped by a series of unprecedented reckonings, Bowdoin students took a creative writing class designed to have them commingle their thinking about the political questions raging through the country and the personal changes in their own lives. Taught by Assistant Professor of English Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, the class— The Personal (Essay) Is Political—took its name from the canonical 1970 Carol Hamisch essay, “The Personal Is Political,” and featured works by classic and contemporary writers, including James Baldwin, June Jordan, Jennine Cápo Crucet, Kaitlyn Greenidge, and Melissa Faliveno, author of the essay collection Tomboyland, who visited the class electronically.

Tomboyland was the first book from writer and filmmaker Joey Soloway’s publishing imprint, and was named a best book of 2020 by NPR; the New York Public Library; O, the Oprah Magazine;

and Electric Literature. Announcing plans for their imprint in February 2018, Soloway said, “We live in a complicated, messy world where every day we have to proactively re-center our own experiences by challenging privilege.” Like Soloway’s production company, the imprint would be directly named for its political aspirations: Topple. At the time, Soloway’s words were seen as a response to #MeToo, #TimesUp, and the global reckoning with gender inequality.

But of course, by the time the imprint actually began publishing, far more reckoning was happening, with structural racism and with inequality laid bare by the pandemic. Tomboyland entered the world during that upheaval.

In January 2021, at a turning point in presidential administrations and as the global pandemic raged on at ever-escalating levels, Faliveno and Marzano-Lesnevich shared the following exchange.

ALEX: How did Tomboyland begin? Did you know

you were writing a collection?

MELISSA: I worked on this book for ten years. I

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich Assistant professor of English

Melissa Faliveno Author of Tomboyland

always knew it would be a collection; it started when I was in the graduate program at Sarah Lawrence College, where I was studying the essay and working with my writerly magnetic north, Jo Ann Beard. It wasn’t really a book then, but a mashing together of very disparate essays—I knew it was at least in part a collection about the Midwest, but I didn’t know much else. Two of the oldest pieces in the book—“Of a Moth” and an early version of “The Finger of God,” without any of the interviews or research, which was eventually published in Prairie Schooner— were part of my thesis. Jo Ann helped me see a little more clearly what I was writing about back then—the Midwest, girlhood, destruction, loss—and helped me believe that I could actually do this. As I continued writing over the years, after graduate school, eking out writing time whenever I could, I slowly started to think more about gender, and these questions of it. I started to write into that too, and into questions of class, and identity, and all these questions about selfhood that I was very much grappling with at the time. I began to realize it was also about the ways those questions intersect with this idea of “The Midwest,” and what it means to be “Midwestern”—about how place can create and complicate our identity, what it means to be “of” a place and then to leave it. When I got an agent, the brilliant Adriann Ranta Zurhellen, she helped me understand that the book was really centered around gender, and everything else— class, violence, the body, the land, guns, sex, isolation, tornadoes, moths—was all connected.

ALEX: You’re working in the personal essay form—

a form that, of course, places the emphasis right away on the personal. What did it mean to you to have the book come out with an imprint whose focus is so explicitly political? How do you think about the relationship between the personal and the political in your work?

“queer” book. I’ve identified as queer for a long time now, but quietly; I think (and this is definitely some of my “Midwesternness” at play) I tried to keep my identity out of my writing. Which is ridiculous. Regardless of what form or genre you write, you’re bringing yourself to it—your experiences and questions and fascinations and fears, the things that keep you up at night. And the personal, it turns out, is always political, whether you want it to be or not. After the 2016 election, I just felt something break open in me. I was furious, and scared—for my friends and my community and myself—and I started grappling with questions I’d never really taken a hard look at before: at the way I exist in the world, at how I’m perceived because of how my body moves through space. Of being pretty far left and coming from gun people in the workingclass Midwest. Of the relationship between gender, class, and violence. When Topple was introduced, I remember being really excited by its mission—that it was helmed by Joey Soloway, that it was specifically dedicated not just to queer voices, but that it put trans and nonbinary writers of color at the very top of that mission statement. My editor, Hafizah Geter, is a queer Black woman who grew up in the Midwest, and as soon as we had a conversation about the book, I knew I wanted to work with her. She just got it, in a way so many other editors didn’t. I ended up being the first title on Topple, and they’ve been super supportive, and have such a massive reach. In the end, I feel really lucky to have published with them—not just because this book has ended up in the hands of so many people it might have otherwise not, but because it’s an imprint whose mission is to literally disrupt the long tradition in this business of publishing books by mostly cis white people. To be a part of something from the ground up that says, “We’re going to do things differently.” I hope more publishers (especially the big ones) start to follow suit.

ALEX: The literary essay has its roots in the work

MELISSA: I really chose to work with Topple

because of its mission. For years, as I worked on this book, I never really thought of it as a

32 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE WINTER 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

of French writer and philosopher Michel de Montaigne; famously, the form comes from the French essai, often translated as “to test”

or “to try.” Joseph Epstein has called personal narrative “the genre of discovery,” driven by movement toward something irresolvable or unknowable. And indeed, many of your essays seem to engage with a kind of grappling, the chasing of a central question or cluster of questions. Do you begin knowing that question, or how does discovery drive your work?

MELISSA: That element of the attempt, and of

Regardless of what form or genre you write, you’re bringing yourself to it—your experiences and questions and fascinations and fears, the things that keep you up at night.

mystery—that driving at something inherently irresolvable or unknowable, digging around in the darker corners of the self and the world— that’s what excites me most about essays. All the best essays are fueled by the grappling itself; the author is working something out, trying to make sense of a question—even when they know they won’t find an answer. The grappling itself is the form. This is really what compels all of my work: there’s a central question, though I don’t always know what it is when I’m starting an essay. I know that I’m obsessed with something—an event, an issue or idea, an interaction, a memory—and I’m not sure why. So often I think I’m writing toward the question of, “Why am I obsessed with this?”

From what and why was this fascination born, and what connections does it have to other parts of my life or the world that I’m not even aware of? That’s what I’m always trying to do, I think—ask the question, or maybe just figure out what the question is. I never really seek an answer—just better questions. So much of Tomboyland is about learning to be more comfortable—maybe even at home—in those spaces of uncertainty: of the body, of society, of the spirit. Of allowing myself to inhabit those dimly lit spaces and look around as closely as I can to see what I can find. For an essay to be successful, to me, it should feel like the reader is on that journey of discovery with me. I want to share all the revelations, the inconsistencies and incongruities, and I want my reader to feel like they’re a partner in exploration, making those discoveries right along with me. One of the most exciting things about the essay is that you can find so much truth—about yourself, about the world—without ever finding an answer. That’s the real art of the form, I think, and to me it’s magic.

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE WINTER 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 33

ALEX: Another remarkable aspect of your work

is how capacious the essays are. You make room for so much research, lyricism, even the voices of others. How do you go about assembling the scope or span of the essay?

MELISSA: I sometimes consider this my curse as

a writer; I can’t seem to write any essay under 10,000 words. I never really know going into an essay what it will entail—I just follow a strand of thought, get lost in research, make some connection that’s really exciting to me, and then end up spiraling out. Then I have to reel it all back in somehow. For this book, I knew I didn’t want it to be my stories alone—I wanted other people’s stories too, for this kind of chorus of voices to create a tapestry of thought, of questions and conversation and exploration. Another thing that’s so exciting to me about the essay is that it can do so many things at once—it can do anything. So this marriage of personal essay, reportage, interview, research—that’s always been the form that I’ve been most interested in, from back to my days writing features for an alt weekly in Madison, Wisconsin. Basically, I just love sitting down with people and asking them about their lives, and their memories, and their struggles, and their obsessions, and then figuring out how those stories and understandings and experiences intersect or diverge from my own, and what we might learn from those connections.

ALEX: By the time you wrote these essays, you

had traversed two American extremes, moving from Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, population 2,000, to taking on the life of a magazine editor in Brooklyn. How did that traversal inform the essays? Does place inform what you think of as political?

MELISSA: Absolutely. You know, I didn’t realize it at the time, but that connection—between place and politics in my essays—didn’t really hit me until I’d been gone from Wisconsin for a few years. When I moved to New York, and found myself at a small, private, liberal arts college—light-years away from a life of public education in Wisconsin—I found myself feeling like such an outsider. I went to school with people whose parents had PhDs, and mine

34 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE WINTER 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

didn’t even have college degrees. I went to literary parties and felt like such a yokel. I had spent a lot of time in my twenties longing to leave Wisconsin—I traveled abroad a lot and wanted to write about anything other than my home state. And then when I moved to New York, I started to feel very fiercely attached to that home. Especially after Trump was elected, and good liberals and East Coast journalists started talking about Midwesterners—especially

working class Midwesterners like many of my family and friends—like they were all idiots, all gun-toting rednecks who voted against their interests. And I didn’t always disagree, but this reductive generalizing of a whole swath of people—it never sat well. So I wanted to interrogate the parts of the Midwest—or my Midwest, anyway; the rural, working class, mostly white part—in all its complexity; the parts I love and the parts I hate, the parts that

What we’re doing as writers is not just an art, or a job; it’s also a means of progress and change and hope. seem contradictory, that confuse me. And to write from my vantage point as one who is from there but apart from there now, who is deeply dedicated to progressive politics but who loves, and is loved by, conservative people. I wanted to write into that complexity of place and politics with a critical but open eye.

ALEX: What was it like to have a first book

come out in such an unprecedented and complex year?

MELISSA: It’s certainly been interesting! Some of it was great—the book got way more attention than I expected, and I was able to do more interviews and podcasts from my apartment in Brooklyn than I might have been able to do otherwise. But some of it was so sad, too: what I wanted most of all when this book came out, what I’ve always dreamed about, was to celebrate this ten-year process and lifelong goal with all my family and friends, here in New York and in Wisconsin and across the country—with people who were so important to the creation of this book (and many of whom are in it).

But with a virtual tour I think more people were able to show up, which was a gift. It was sometimes difficult to navigate where this book fit, or to see its purpose, during a time of great social upheaval and racial reckoning, but I received so many messages from queer people, from the Midwest and all over the country, who told me what it meant to them, that they felt seen for the first time, that they felt less alone— so that was a useful reminder. But this year definitely made me more aware of the work I need to do to better interrogate whiteness and privilege, in myself and in the places I come from, and how I might address this in my writing more directly.

ALEX: As a professor at the University of North

Carolina–Chapel Hill, a guest lecturer in classes like The Personal (Essay) Is Political, and formerly the senior editor of Poets & Writers, you spend a lot of time engaging with the work of younger writers. As you mentioned, you were a firstgeneration college student yourself. Why do you feel reaching college students with this form in particular is so important?

ALEX: What role does creative writing have to

MELISSA: When I went to college, at the

play in political change, in imagining a new world—and maybe, as we’ve been discussing, a new awareness of, and engagement with, complexity and difficulty—into becoming?

University of Wisconsin—a public school, with in-state tuition, where I worked several jobs to help pay my way through and still racked up debt I’m still paying off—I never really believed that I could “be a writer.” I knew I wanted to write, but I didn’t know how. When I took my first creative nonfiction workshop, it was a revelation—I knew immediately that I wanted to write essays. That this wildly exciting combination of personal narrative, cultural reportage, politics, social issues, humor, drama, and interrogation, was what I wanted to do with my life. But I didn’t believe I was the kind of person who could do it. Not as a job, anyway. A life of creative and scholarly work seemed another world away, something reserved for a different kind of person. And I guess, these days, when I work with young essayists—as well as aspiring essayists who aren’t young, who have lived whole lives and had whole careers and families before pursuing a dream—I want them to know it’s possible. That they can do this. And I want to help them look at the world as essayists— to explore it, to make discoveries, to seek the thrill and miracle in that. To read and observe the world and ask questions of it—to practice this form, in all its weirdness and complexity, and get experimental. To find and explore the essential queerness in the essay as a form. Mostly, I want them to know that their voices, and experiences, and lives, and questions, and stories are important. That they can write those stories down, and people like me will read them.

MELISSA: Creative writing has always played

an important role in effecting political change—in helping people learn and grow and better empathize with one another, and right now I think we’re seeing that so directly, in the literature about systemic racism and other social injustice in America. I feel like problems that many people have been made painfully aware of, and struggling against, for generations are finally working their way into the consciousness of more Americans, especially white Americans, and you can almost track that by the books being bought and read in our country right now. It’s hopeful, to me, and helps me realize that writing can be such a powerful—such a critical—tool in political and social change, in helping people evolve as thinkers and humans, maybe even in changing minds; in helping people better understand experiences outside their own race or gender or sexual orientation or ability or socioeconomic status. I try to keep this in mind when I write and when I teach—especially when I’m feeling cynical about the world: that what we’re doing as writers is not just an art, or a job; it’s also a means of progress and change and hope.

Language, words, art, books—it’s all a tool of communication, of connection, of empathy, of protest. Of imagining a better world. It can also be a weapon, as the outgoing president and his supporters have proven time and again, with the ability to cause great harm, incite violence, drive us further apart. I think it’s our job as writers to strike back, to wield that weapon for good.

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is an assistant professor of English and award-winning author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir. They have written for The New York Times, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Boston Globe, Oxford American, and Harper’s.

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE WINTER 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 35

UN RE LENT ING ILLUSTRATIONS BY

LINCOLN AGNEW

THE PRESENT NEVER STOPS

Bowdoin students have always learned, whatever years they studied here, that the present affects, informs, and sometimes distracts from their work. But there hasn’t been a year in recent history quite like the last one.

In the wake of it, Bowdoin Magazine gathered a group of faculty who had taught classes during all this that seemed particularly suited to or subject to a lot of change and chaos as a result of the world that was 2020.

BOWDOIN: Everybody has had to deal with COVID-19 and, in the middle of that crisis, there emerged a problem that was always there— racism and the ugly picture that it paints in this country, the murderous picture that it paints.

And then swirling all around was the election.

Not only were your students dealing with all of those things, but you were too. The Academy isn’t exactly known for turning on a dime, and yet we could see in some classes that that was very much happening. People were adapting what they were teaching, in some cases creating new classes. How did you approach all this?

What did you do?

NANCY RILEY: In some ways I had the most obvious situation. I knew I was going to be teaching Epidemiology before the pandemic started, before everything shut down. As we got toward the shutdown, I knew that the class would be all around COVID. That said, COVID was never just COVID. It has never just been COVID. It has been politicized, it’s racialized, there’s a class issue, there are transnational issues. All of those happened. I teach social epidemiology, so

PARTICIPANTS Meryem Belkaïd Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures Theo Greene Assistant Professor of Sociology David Hecht Associate Professor of History Salar Mohandesi Assistant Professor of History Nancy Riley A. Myrick Freeman Professor of Social Sciences

I’m less interested in the particular pathogen— although it’s important—and am more interested in how the social world is affected.

Here’s one example of the problems that I think all of us had to deal with in different ways.

So we were dealing with COVID all the time in my class. But one day, right before class—and I try not to talk about politics in Washington within my class—Donald Trump announced, “Oh, COVID, it’s just like the flu. It’s no worse than the flu.”

And I wanted my students to deal with it.

So I scrambled, literally in the last half hour before class, trying to gather some materials and get them to take this issue on. Not just whether it’s more or less dangerous than the flu, which they knew how to deal with, but the misinformation itself.

Their version at first was, “Oh my God, he’s such a jerk.” But I knew that we had to get beyond that quickly. So I encouraged them to gather the tools they’ve learned in my class and use them to make an argument against what he said. And they did it really well. They had to pivot.

They had to figure out how to make sense of it in a real way, rather than just react to the statement.

They had to say, no, that’s not true, because of this, and this, and this. They lined it all up.

Students also—not just us—have had to pivot, we have had to force them to pivot. This has been true for so many things in the last year, but I give it as an example of how these things are intertwined. While we might like to see purely—just purely look at purely COVID— that’s impossible. It was always impossible.

SALAR MOHANDESI: I had a similar experience.

I was teaching a course called A History of the Present, which I had proposed and organized before all of this happened. I had decided to teach the course for a number of reasons.

First, because I thought that while students are very familiar with events happening right now, things in the recent past, in the 1990s or 2000s, remain kind of vague. I thought it was important to connect the dots between the history they had learned in high school, leading up to the 1950s and 1960s, and what happens in the present. Second, because I was personally convinced that we’ve been in a deep crisis since at

least the late 2000s, and we’re going to continue to be in one for years to come, I wanted to set aside some time to really analyze and anatomize the crisis of the present. And the last thing was that a lot of students like to approach professors to talk about what’s going on. And this usually happens outside of class or in office hours.

I wanted to create a space where you could actually dig into it in a very scholarly way, think about the relationship between the past and the present, and especially the methodologies of how we approach the study of the present in a formal historical manner. So we started out the course with a lot of methodological questions.

What do you gain by studying your own time?

What do you lose? What are the challenges?

Then we went through the history of the North Atlantic from the late 1980s, the fall of the Berlin Wall, all the way to the present, 2020.

On our last day before spring break, I assigned a bunch of texts on the concept of crisis—Antonio Gramsci, Nancy Fraser, Reinhart Koselleck—and we discussed the meaning of the word “crisis.” And we never returned and met as a class in person again. Now, I have to say, when the pandemic broke out and everything happened, I didn’t really have to adjust anything because the whole point of the class was that we were already in a crisis, and that we should try to understand it historically.

The way that I had structured the class was not by focusing on current events, but trying to understand the history that made this present possible. When you approach the present in this way, you’re not really scrambling to include current events; you’re trying to develop a way to think about the present. Instead of chasing after things, racing to cover the latest news story, you have given students a larger framework for making sense of all that is happening.

And it really brought to light a lot of the abstract theoretical questions. Because our final assignment was to collectively map the present, and everything that was happening. It was so difficult to figure out where everything fit. Is this important? Is this not? It was hard to wrap it all up because things were moving so quickly. It was kind of a never-ending thing. Students kept talking with each other after the class ended, because the present doesn’t stop.

“We all have subjectivity. Just because we want to say something is true, that something is factual, there are always different versions, different ways that people frame certain events, certain moments.”

—THEO GREENE, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY

THEO GREENE: I think that’s really interesting.

I am always engaging with the present in my class. I believe sociology is really about giving students a language to be able to analyze the world around them. Last semester, in the fall, I taught classical theory. And the last time I taught it was four years ago. What I normally do in the class is pair a classical text with a contemporary one to show students why it is classical, right? The fact that a lot of these texts—Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Du Bois, et cetera—are still used, and they live, and they evolve in contemporary research. I thought it’d be really cute in 2016 to pair Weber’s politics as a vocation with this question of Trump’s ascendancy as a candidate. At the time, we were thinking about him as a candidate, never thinking about the fact he would actually win.

And then it happened. And a student actually asked, why are we studying this when the world around us is burning? And I had to do what students famously call the “O captain!

My captain!” speech, where I kind of say they should take the knowledge that they learned in these classes to be able not only to understand and talk about it, but to fight for what they believe in to make the world a better place.

So this time I taught classical theory I was much better prepared. We still talk about Trump, we talk about COVID, we talk about these issues. A lot of their final projects were focused around contemporary events where they’re reusing classical theories to be able to analyze them. And that student who in 2016 raised the question about why it matters is now a graduate student at UC Davis, and he sent me an email to thank me about that day.

He was thinking about the election, election results, and how he’s now taking a classical theory course in graduate school and how important that day was as part of his journey. It’s one of the things that sparked my interest to constantly stay on top of what’s going on, because I think students will always ask those questions. And so I’m ready in one way or another, whether it’s incorporating it into the class discussion, or fashioning it into an assignment for students to grapple with material from the course.

BOWDOIN: That’s a lot of work for you, because there is an expectation that if you are bringing material, it’s vetted, that you’ve approached it as a scholar, there’s a certain amount of research.

It’s hard enough to put together a class. Now you have to put together a class and then, on the fly, change the material. How does that work?

NANCY RILEY: But it’s what we do always. Whatever our field is. We’re always interpreting the world around us from that field. I remember being at a baseball game with a bunch of students, and I said something about the fans, and a student turned to me and said, “Are you ever not a sociologist?” And I said, “No, I am never not.” I’m always a sociologist. It is what we do, I think. The question is how we bring it, which might be a different issue.

MERYEM BELKAÏD: One of the classes I teach is

called Contemporary France through the Media.

And it is really following the news. The students have to do a press review, and it was very interesting the first half of the semester last spring, when they were giving updates about

what wasn’t yet a pandemic. We were looking at each other and getting a little bit worried, but it started a very interesting conversation.

And in this last semester we revisited all the themes that we engage with, with the lens of the pandemic and COVID-19. So, for example, when we talked about discrimination and the suburbs around the big cities of France and issues of racism that usually the students tend to minimize compared to the US—they have sometimes an idealized vision of France—the figures of COVID-19 were emphasizing what I was saying a few weeks before. I was just saying that these parts of the French territory were completely abandoned, and they didn’t have enough hospitals. These were the things that I

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE WINTER 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 39

said in the beginning, and then the news emphasized those facts. So, as you all said, it’s this balance between knowing what we are going to talk about during the semester and also letting the world shape what we are going to teach about.

DAVID HECHT: I try to not give myself the pres-

sure of being an expert on everything about the current event that is coming into the classroom.

I have a particular scholarly interest, the history of science. And that gives me a perspective on current events. So, in my Health, Culture, and

Society seminar this past fall, I’m going to be able to highlight a certain set of issues in contemporary politics or with COVID that somebody else might not gravitate to. And I might deemphasize others, because they’re not in my area of expertise. So, yes, there is some work you need to do to keep up with what’s going on, but what I can offer is my particular take or a particular set of insights that I think I have.

I know something about science communication, so I can maybe help them understand why people are believing or not believing what they believe or don’t believe. But I’m not going to task myself with also being an expert on policy formation or any one of the innumerable other things that one could talk about.

THEO GREENE: I think that’s important. Because

part of what we’re doing in the classroom is teaching students how to think and how to process things. And so, as we are getting information and the information is only partial, I think part of it is helping students with the tools to be able to think about these through the frames in which our expertise does lie. But that’s something we do as researchers and scientists as well. I think about my research as an ethnographer, where I go out into the field. I study gay neighborhoods, and one day I’m studying a pride parade. And, next thing I know, the Pulse tragedy happens, and the community pivots.

And I have to be able to learn very quickly how to make sense of that moment. Because the real

“One of the things I try to teach them is that you’re going to have to learn to stand on unstable ground, because you’re never going to find the one place where it tells you the whole world.”

—NANCY RILEY, A. MYRICK FREEMAN PROFESSOR OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

40 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE WINTER 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

world is very unpredictable. In those moments, I’m going to use the tools in my toolkit to make sense of what’s happening. And that’s what we do in the classroom as well. As these developments happen, I don’t think we’re trying to provide them with answers, but to help them think about how to ask the questions.

NANCY RILEY: I think that’s a really good point,

and it brings in the role of students in all this.

In my epidemiology class, students quickly learn that I have a background in public health, but there are all these areas I don’t know anything about. I explain to them how I try to read the science journals and learn things, but I actually don’t know the answer. And what I really like is that some of my students took it on themselves, the ones who had a science background, and brought it into class. It’s a way we, as teachers, can demonstrate that it’s shared—that knowledge, gaining and sharing knowledge, is part of what we’re doing; we’re connecting and collaborating across all kinds of different fields. That’s so much better than having somebody say, “Yes, this is what is true, and this is what is false.”

DAVID HECHT: And if I can say, to echo what

Theo and Nancy just said, it is not hard to get information and opinions on COVID or any other major news story, right? So a large part of what we can do is this kind of critical thinking piece of helping them process in just the way that you both were saying.

BOWDOIN: That makes me think of the facts and scholarship. People think of those things as being dispassionate. They just are true or not true, and yet at the same time, you have passion for your fields, and you want to cultivate passion in your students. But does all of this stuff swirling around, does any of that get in the way of objectivity? And what do you do about that?

THEO GREENE: What is objectivity?

ALL: (laughter) THEO GREENE: As an African American sitting

here and witnessing all of this, who is deeply impacted by this, who has family that they’re

concerned about all of the time, as someone who tested positive for COVID over the course of the semester and had to teach classes—these are issues. What I always say to my students is that we all have subjectivity. Just because we want to say something is true, that something is factual, there are always different versions, different ways that people frame certain events, certain moments.

I always tell students, “I come as a gay, Black professor.” I have a gay, Black stank. I call it “the stank,” which is a subjectivity, about how I teach Marx, how I teach sexuality, how I teach art in the city. And that’s fine, but you also have “a stank.” You also have a subjectivity, and if your subjectivity happens to disagree with mine, you’re welcome to disagree. You’re welcome to bring in whatever evidence, and we work through that. Because, again, the skill is not to tell them what to think. It’s to provide them with skills of how to think about these issues.

NANCY RILEY: And how to bring in that evidence.

THEO GREENE: And support it.

MERYEM BELKAÏD: It’s at the same time similar

and different for me, because I teach a lot about France and the colonial past, and I am Algerian; my country was colonized by France.

So I always have to find the balance, and I’m always asking myself when I have, for example, a critical discourse vis-à-vis France’s colonial past. And I’m talking about the state, of course, and the authorities and the colonial authorities.

I’m always questioning myself. Are the students thinking that I’m having this discourse because I’m Algerian and I’m trying to give this horrible image of France while I’m teaching?

I usually, as Theo said, state what is my position as a person, as a scholar with my identity, and also try to explain how I have built this knowledge toward the past using literature, using history, using sources. And also, I would say—and I’m sure you will agree with me, Theo—using a sense of humor and just showing that I’m absolutely aware of how it can be interpreted and opening a discussion and conversation about it. And so making the students feel comfortable enough to voice questions about what I’m saying and why I’m saying it.

THEO GREENE: I totally agree with that. But I will say this too. We know—there are studies out there—that students often find women professors and professors of color less “objective” than straight white male professors.

And, in some ways, it puts a lot of responsibility on those who occupy those marginal spaces to find ways around this question of how to deal with objectivity in the classroom, to be able to engage students with the necessary outcomes, the learning goals that we want them to walk away from the classroom with.

NANCY RILEY: I think it’s also up to white people

to take this issue up.... I mean, the fact that some groups get “marked” and others are unmarked, and therefore more objective, is baloney. One of the things I feel that, as a white person, I have to do in the classroom is to mark my own perspective. We’re all speaking from a perspective of race, a perspective of gender, a perspective of...whatever it is. And so I try very hard to do that because I think it’s part of dealing with the issue of race in the classroom, and racist scholarship, and our own perspective.

THEO GREENE: I think it’s also important to name it. There’s a lot of hidden labor that marginalized professors often take on in terms of pedagogy, which I think needs to be brought more to the front. It needs to be named. It needs to be identified, which is why I’m saying it. I agree with you, Nancy. I think everyone should be able to come in front of a classroom and be able to identify and mark their subjectivity. We know that doesn’t happen. But we also have to recognize the fact that, because it doesn’t happen, those who have these unique positions in front of the classroom have to come up with different ways and different strategies to engage students.

BOWDOIN: President [Clayton] Rose puts a stake

in the ground on various subjects from time to time, something college presidents have done historically—or have intentionally avoided doing—forever. They’ve had that role. But do you think the academy itself, the institution of learning itself, has a social responsibility? Is there a responsibility to take what’s happening in the world and prepare your students somehow to deal with those specific things?

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NANCY RILEY: Of course! Of course the academy has a responsibility, absolutely. I mean, the academy has tried the hands-off approach.

That’s crazy. That is a struggle for any of us who live in the world and work in the academy. I think we know it.

DAVID HECHT: I absolutely agree with that. But

the question then becomes How? I’m just thinking in terms of the two classes I taught in the fall. My seminar on health, culture, and society was...as you might expect, COVID came up probably every day. It was a major driving force of all of the conversations. My other class, nominally a lecture class, Imagining Disaster, was something that was relevant, and indeed I scheduled it to take advantage of the moment.

But, as I would get into discussions, I felt that in order to really understand the history of how society creates a response to disasters, we sort of had to move away from COVID, because it was a very easy comparison to make. Students would immediately see the parallels between a moment of crisis in history and our current moment. But the more you get into the details, the more you’re like, “Well, it’s too easy to just say, ‘We still see this today.’”

So, in that class, the current events almost became a kind of hook that we would use to look back and say, “On a broadest level, yes, these patterns have historical roots. But there are also differences among historical eras, or geographical context, or whatever number of variables.” So I think the question becomes how best you make the course relevant, and that can vary quite a bit.

MERYEM BELKAÏD: One of the worries that I

have as a teacher, for the students, is are they understanding the complexity of a situation?

It’s not only my take on it. It’s just how complex what we are studying is, even for me. So when I’m teaching literature, I want to leave them with questions more than answers.

When I teach about the city of Paris, in their mind it’s a mythical city. And I try to show all the ways that this city can be represented, as the city of arts, of culture, but also the capital of the colonial empire, a city where you have also police violence, and all these

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images all together. And for me, it’s one of my responsibilities not to leave them with any of these images as the striking one. I want all these images to stay and to live together in a way, and not one take power over the other.

I want them to know that Paris is a complex city, because it has a complex past. It has sociological complexities and so forth, and it would be the same for North Africa, which is part of the Arab world, and part of the Mediterranean, and part of the African continent, and it’s a Francophone area where French is spoken but also Arabic and many other languages. So I want to leave them with this idea that, whatever subject you start to study, you are never done with it—because that’s what we are passionate about, this exploration that starts and will never stop, if I’m doing my work correctly with them.

to become complex thinkers and really think about these things in multifaceted ways, to go out to the world and do the big things that they ultimately are destined to do.

DAVID HECHT: On this question of what’s your

responsibility, one thing I struggle with is that engaging with contemporary issues can be very deflating. I’m thinking particularly in terms of climate change, which is something that comes up a lot in my classes.

With climate change, both the technical situation and the political situation around it are depressing, if you really try to see the depth of what’s going on with those things. So the question—as a teacher, that is—is how do you not completely depress your students but be intellectually honest at the same time? I don’t really have an answer for that.

NANCY RILEY: And, Meryem, don’t you find that

students often want the one answer? They’re sort of at a place where they don’t want to have to hold it all in their head. And so one of the things I try to teach them is that you’re going to have to learn to stand on unstable ground, because you’re never going to find the one place where it tells you the whole world.

THEO GREENE: They hate it for the fourteen

weeks they do it, and then five years later, you get an email from a student saying, “Thank you for making this complex for me.” And I think, to go back to your question, the reason why colleges and universities, academia, have this responsibility is that our students think of Bowdoin as a safe space for the exploration of these ideas. It’s a safe space to talk about it and think about it, and even though they hate when it happens, where it’s okay to sometimes get it wrong.

And, as Meryem says, it’s our job to sort of throw that ball back by opening up that space and making it more complex and more complicated, and showing that there are many different ways to look at it, many different ways to approach it, and many different ways even to mobilize it, to answer a question. And sometimes that raises more questions. But, at the end of the day, I think what we are doing here is providing students with a foundation

MERYEM BELKAÏD: That’s a great question.

NANCY RILEY: Well, how did you do this if you were talking about the world in crisis?

DAVID HECHT: Right, Imagining Disaster. I basically

sort of named that whole course around my problem here. And it becomes a little bit of a running joke: “Here’s yet another depressing thing.” I guess there are ways to frame things in somewhat positive lights. But it can get challenging.

SALAR MOHANDESI: This is a very tricky question, because part of the assumption is that knowledge can lead to the power to change the world.

But that may not actually be true. Just because you have the correct analysis, the right skills, the best approach, you historicize the present, you weight the complexities, even if you have all the tools, if you have managed to predict the present, it does not mean that you have the capacity to change things or to make them any better. Maybe, maybe not.

Ultimately, your question of social responsibility is about politics. This is a tough one. On the one hand, everything we do is touched by politics. The syllabus is political, how we teach is political. We can’t pretend to escape politics. On the other hand, you don’t want to overload everything with politics. You

“When I was a teenager, a civil war started in Algeria and I lived through it. And I think that, naively, I thought that would be the most complicated time of my life.”

—MERYEM BELKAÏD, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ROMANCE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

want to inform, but you don’t want to cross the line. We’re professors, not political organizers.

Bowdoin is not a political party.

This gets back to David’s question: Is it our role to motivate? I mean, are we commissars trying to pump people up for some cause? I don’t think so. But at the same time, students who take courses that explicitly deal with the present rightly want to know what to do next.

This is one of the most difficult challenges for those of us who do engage with the present: we’re inevitably touching on a lot of things that exceed what’s in our job description.

THEO GREENE: And, while that’s true, one of the

things I think we do in our classrooms is often burst the bubble of privilege that our students have when they come here and that they have been surrounded by for such a long time. They think the world is some happy rainbow, Mary Tyler Moore sort of reality, and some students are shocked and disappointed to find out that there are deep inequalities and that the world is very messed up in a lot of ways, and that all of this effort does not yield answers.

How many of us have had students come to us at Thanksgiving concerned about having very difficult conversations with parents and family members, that their minds have changed? And again, to a certain point, we don’t want to depress them and say, “The world is messed up,” or there’s nothing they can do.

I think there is something exciting about bursting that bubble and giving them a sense that maybe we can’t solve the problem tomorrow.

But you can be angry about that. It can spur you to particular kinds of action, right?

And I think about, Salar, students who feel like they’re going to be Marxists and change

the world and blow up capitalism. I’m teaching classical theory, where they’re so quick to blame capitalism for everything, and I’m like, “Okay, one of these days...,”—I’ll say this to their face— “at your 25th reunion, when I am hopefully tenured and endowed with a chair named after you because you cornered some market on Wall Street, we’ll toast and laugh about the moment that you wanted to blow up capitalism.”

So, yes, the world is a sad, depressing place sometimes, and there are lots of complex problems that we can’t solve. But at the same time, we teach these fourteen-week, fifteen-week intervals. We’re not going to engage all of that, but I think to spark anger, to spark passion, to spark a desire for students to realize that there is something that they can try to do, there is some place that they can take it if they want to, if they so choose, is really important as well.

MERYEM BELKAÏD: I think that’s actually the rea-

son why I love to teach literature, because there is in literature something very empowering also, even if parts of the courses are depressing.

I think that the beauty of literature, in periods of turmoil, is to remind us of the beauty that is around us, beauty and also the strength. For example, this semester, I was teaching a text on Fanon, and it was the day of the election. And it was perfect. I didn’t do it on purpose really. But the poetry of Fanon’s text was really helpful.

DAVID HECHT: Salar, you put it so well in terms of this assumption about the link between knowledge and power that I think is a core assumption of what many of us do or what brought us to this field. And it’s not at all clear that there’s really a link there. And I think that’s really unsettling.

THEO GREENE: Well, I also think there is a kind

of beauty in the struggle. Look, you have every single oppression thrust upon you, you learn how to deal with this, right? There is a certain kind of beauty in thinking about it. You realize it’s not power; you realize sometimes it makes you even more powerless. I think the last four years has taught us that, as this administration tried to buck anything that had to do with science, anything that had to do with knowledge. You think about that 1776 report, which will make you want to flip over a table. It has been a never-ending assault on academia, right? But what I think comes out of that is the fact that we’re still fighting that fight every day.

And as much as we want to say, yes, knowledge doesn’t necessarily equal power, yes, things are very depressing, it still sparks us to

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what have you. I had a former student who now works on Wall Street send me an email after the failed insurrection, thinking about something he read about white supremacists and asking me for more readings that he could engage in.

That impact is powerful. Even though, again, I’m not in the business of solving problems, I’m giving tools to think about how to understand the world as it is. If they’re able to take something out of my classroom and five years down the line say, “I’m watching what’s going on. The world is on fire. And yet, as I think about this, I think about what you talked about in class, what we read.” It’s good to know.

BOWDOIN: Everybody has an experience of COVID one way or the other, because it’s all happening to us and to our families and to our world. But everyone’s experience of racism is undeniably different for different people. And some people have virtually no experience with it.

How do you get past the feeling that maybe, on something that feels so fraught, they’re not sure they have a standing to have an opinion?

get out and teach with enthusiasm. And even when we don’t necessarily want to, in a certain kind of spirit to support our students when they’re trying to come up with answers and there aren’t any, when the world isn’t working the way it’s supposed to. And I think that’s also something that’s really important as well. The culmination of many, many years of struggle.

And throughout, there’s lots of beauty in that.

I think that’s something else that is unnamed, in terms of the labor that we do, that should be named.

SALAR MOHANDESI: This goes back to the point that I was making. We’re professors, but because of the pandemic, we’ve had to also become social workers and therapists and motivational figures. Of course, the work of an academic is to do a lot of things—you teach, you write, you research, you interact with students. But something I’ve felt this past year is that having so many conversations with students about all the things that are happening in the world is really blurring the boundary between my work as a professor and something else.

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NANCY RILEY: I totally agree. It’s one of the

NANCY RILEY: Well, we all have a standing in this.

reasons we’re all so exhausted. Whatever our reactions are, which are often important and strong too—people getting sick, our families getting sick, our worries about racism. But we’re also dealing with students who are really looking to us and needing us in ways that are just so hard at times. Most of us are not trained as counselors, and that’s difficult.

When I first came to Bowdoin, I realized that a lot of these students are going to end up in positions of power, partly because of where they come from, but also because Bowdoin propels them in that way. I had a number of experiences where people you wouldn’t think would be the type have actually had their eyes opened because of things they learned at Bowdoin. And that in some ways is a piece of inspiration for me—because we could pretend that hierarchy is not going to happen, but it is.

I think that’s one of the things we have to get our students to understand. They might think they’re outside of it, but they’re not. No one’s outside of it. We do have different experiences, absolutely. And some are more violent and more harmful than others’ experiences, but we all are part of it. I think that can be hard sometimes for white students who have grown up in Maine, for example, to come to terms with. But many of them do. I think in our classes and in other spaces at Bowdoin, students come to understand that not only are they not able to stand outside it, they don’t stand outside it. We’re part of this system. All of us are.

THEO GREENE: I just want to piggyback on what you said. Again, I think that’s the beauty of what we’re doing. We’re not stopping them from working on Wall Street or for oil companies or

THEO GREENE: It is a question of how that’s deliv-

ered. Speaking with a lot of my Black colleagues, I think there is a greater wish, at least among the faculty, that there would be a common way in which people can understand and engage these questions, particularly as it refers to anti-Black racism in the United States. There’s no one in this room that can replicate and understand my experience and my perspective as a Black man,

the same way that I can’t replicate or speak to the experiences of whiteness or experiences that other people have within this particular space.

And yet, Nancy’s correct that we are all embedded in the system that we produce—in this racial inequality—in lots of different complex ways.

Our students sometimes feel put off by being told what their experience is, what their experience ought to be. Because maybe they’re sitting in a classroom with a white professor trying to tell them about anti-Black racism. So there is a lot of complexity there. All of us—Clayton and [Michael Reed, senior vice president for inclusion and diversity] and a lot of the faculty—are engaging in this conversation now as to how to do this in a way that does what Nancy says. On the one hand, that says that racism is something that we’re not outside of, but at the same time, recognizes the fact that it’s not something we all experience in the same way.

NANCY RILEY: It’s a tough issue to be teaching about and through. It is something that is difficult for all of us, students and faculty alike.

SALAR MOHANDESI: Certainly, I think it means that the professor’s role as a mediator and conversation facilitator is very important. I’ve noticed this in my History of the Present class. I had a whole day on identity politics, and I deliberately assigned some extremely provocative articles. We reached this point where a couple of students of color were heatedly debating an issue, but many of the white students were quite reserved. I think they were worried about getting involved, thinking, “Well, is this actually our thing?” “If I say something, will I be canceled?” But at the same time, you don’t want to make it so that race is just a thing that people of color talk about. So there’s a lot more that you have to navigate, especially because it’s such a charged issue. We have to be very careful about our language. There are a lot of dynamics at play here.

MERYEM BELKAÏD: I think, for me, one of the

things that is helpful is that I don’t speak about the United States per se, I speak about other regions, other countries, and other issues. But I think it’s also important because it helps the students also to compare.

I think it’s important to open the conversation to other spaces and discriminations that happen elsewhere. It enriches the conversation and discussions in the classroom. And I think it helps me create what we call a safe space, where everybody can help with some ideas and some knowledge.

There is this moment that, for me, is a very interesting one. It’s in the class called Literature, Power, and Resistance, when you have some African American writers who went to France because they wanted to escape racism in the US. And then we have texts from authors from Cameroon and Algeria saying how much they love living in New York, because they wanted to escape the racism in France. And I really love this moment in the classroom, because we are confronted with what does it mean? Baldwin says that he goes to France because he wants to escape, but he sees the racism in Paris; he’s lucid.

And it’s the same for Achille Mbembe when he arrives in New York. He’s, “Oh, wonderful, New York is wonderful.” And then he adds, “But I know it’s not wonderful for every Black man and Black woman.” And it starts this discussion that helps everybody express ideas. And I have to add, as Salar said, choosing the words carefully.

I am even more in a delicate situation because they have to speak in French, and so I just have to really help them and be a mediator in the terms they can use, can’t use, how to say it. Even the word “race” is not used in French as it is used in the US, and that sparks a conversation, and I think it’s interesting for them.

issue as well as a standing issue. When I’m trying to have a conversation about race that is connected to a subject that I know well, such as differential effects of nuclear testing and nuclear waste on certain kinds of communities, I feel that I can bring race into that conversation.

And then I don’t feel like I’m out of my depth.

But when discussions around race move out of those areas that I’m very familiar with for research reasons, then I get less comfortable and it gets more challenging to accomplish that nimbleness that Salar was talking about.

THEO GREENE: Even the approaches in which

we’re addressing race are beginning to change and become a moving target. I think about this in terms of sociology, now that we’ve begun to

DAVID HECHT: It’s comforting to know that other people struggled to have these conversations as well. I also feel, for me, that there’s an expertise

“In order to really understand the history of how society creates a response to disasters, we sort of had to move away from COVID.” —DAVID HECHT, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY

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“It’s one thing to say that a person of color likely has more experience with racism than a white person, but it’s a different thing to draw a straight line between purported identity and academic expertise.”

—SALAR MOHANDESI, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY

really embrace Du Bois as a father of sociology.

This whole new strand of Du Bois in sociology completely reframes the ways in which we’re talking about race and particularly marginal others from this “deficit framework,” where we’re talking about the oppression of Black people, to one that’s more assets-based. To think about the fact that, yes, the structures of racial oppression also yielded a different way in which Black people think about place, a different way in which Black people think about

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culture, the way that I could think about family.

And in doing so, I think it also connects us with what both David and Meryem said. I think it helps produce a richer, more multilayered, complex understanding of the experience of marginal peoples in a way that is far more effective than simply talking about racism as racism. To be able to say that we see the various kinds of oppressions that exist in certain kinds of contexts. And also to say, from that, people created music as a form of protest. People moved in the great migration and took pieces of the South with them. And we see that in literature, we see that in fashion, we see it in culture. And we see the impacts in terms of the environment, in terms of politics, in terms of everything else.

And so I think, the more we do to channel some of these things into our expertise, I think there’s greater opportunities to different kinds of exposures of different perspective points.

I think that can be very useful when we have these conversations about race, racism, racial oppression, et cetera.

SALAR MOHANDESI: What David said reminds

me of something I’ve been thinking about a lot, which is this question of standing and expertise based on your background. I think what’s happened is that places like Bowdoin have made a concerted effort to diversify their faculty, which you can see in the composition

of the incoming faculty. On the one hand, this is really great, because it’s important for students to have professors who look like them, have similar backgrounds, similar interests, similar experiences. I think it’s fantastic. On the other hand, there’s sometimes a risk of a kind of essentialism, a tendency to believe that professors of a certain background are automatically experts in that topic. For example, everyone from the Middle East is an expert on the geopolitics of the Middle East, or all Black professors are naturally experts in race.

Now, it’s one thing to say that a person of color likely has more experience with racism than a white person, but it’s a different thing to draw a straight line between purported identity and academic expertise. This kind of thinking can also lead to the opposite problem: confusion around people who teach something that’s different from their ascribed identity. I’ve experienced this many times, as people have expressed astonishment that I work on Europe and not on Iran, even though my parents were born in Iran. In graduate school I had a friend who told me, “You know, you’re the most un-Iranian Iranian I’ve ever met because you don’t work on the Middle East.” Now, this all is very silly, but it actually touches on a kind of important issue in the academy right now, which is this sense of an essentialized authenticity.

If you teach something that is directly connected to your identity, you’re almost treated like a natural expert. But on the other hand, if you teach something that is not based on your identity, you sometimes get questioned for not being authentic. There’s this feeling that you can’t possibly teach about something that isn’t your ethnicity, unless you’ve done deep historical research on a very specific aspect of the topic.

MERYEM BELKAÏD: I completely agree and second that, Salar. I have this moment that I do consciously, which is tell the students, “You can study whatever topic you want to study, whatever you are interested in, you can commit yourself. Doesn’t matter where you’re from. If you are passionate about something, just go for it.” There is something we are missing if we start assigning your field according to your identity; I think it goes against a lot of principles in a

way. It doesn’t have to work like this. It can, and it’s welcomed, but I think it’s very important to remind students and help them overcome maybe their resistance or shyness or whatever we can call it when they don’t want to speak about something. If you want to talk about something, just read about it and you will become an expert.

THEO GREENE: But it can be a slippery slope. And

I think we have to keep that in perspective. So to be able to say, yes, you can read something and become an expert at it. I think it’s very different than being able to say that you can speak about an experience or you can speak for people and their experiences. I experienced the same thing studying sexualities. Apparently Black people don’t have sexualities in the field that I study; people are often very surprised by that. I’m often in my sociology classes, teaching white European scholars and, again, I think the way in which they take that knowledge is very different than some of the ways they take my teaching other kinds of knowledge or bodies of knowledge.

But I think we also have to recognize the intersections of what we’re learning and the real world, and how students are also trying to navigate their positions in the world, and I think we can run into some danger. Knowledge, as you said earlier, doesn’t necessarily equal power. It also doesn’t necessarily equal the ability to speak for. It all is circumscribed in context and perspective.

BOWDOIN: Has anything about this whole

experience surprised you?

SALAR MOHANDESI: One thing that really

surprised me was the emotional aspect of it all. I think it’s one thing to analyze the present as a scholar, and it’s another thing to actually live through it. When I designed my History of the Present course, I felt like I had a good sense of what was happening. I don’t want to say I saw it all coming, but in many respects, much of what happened in 2020 was foreseeable. I don’t think it should have been a surprise to us that there was an anti-racist movement that happened this summer. I don’t even think it should’ve been surprising to us that there was an economic downturn. I don’t think it

should’ve been surprising to us that there was a pandemic—epidemiologists have been warning us about this for years now.

So many of these things, I think, we could have predicted; the evidence was there. But when it did happen, I was emotionally unprepared for it, and so were my students. It was very surprising to me how deeply embedded emotions are in history. I think sometimes there’s a tendency to gloss over this, when you look at economics or cultural trends or political ideas, major events, but the emotions are always there.

And it’s kind of helped me and my students better understand past events. Like in my ’60s class, when the crisis happened, we were looking at ’68 and everything that was going on, and I had my students do some oral histories with people who lived in the past and then also an oral history with themselves. And they said that living through this crisis allowed them to better understand how it may have felt like for people in the past to live through these moments.

Of course, the feelings are different. We can’t make a one-to-one thing, but this sometimes gets lost. How we live through and the emotions that we have during a crisis situation, and how we communicate that and teach that. And that’s certainly something I’ve become much more attentive to in my classes—not just teaching great texts or big ideas, but how does it really feel and what creative ways can you try to find to communicate the emotions in moments of crisis, rather than just like, “Oh, here are the big factors that led to explosions.” How does it really feel for people? That’s something that was kind of unexpected for me and has made me really rethink the way that I teach, not just about the present but the past.

THEO GREENE: The election of 2016 actually taught me some of that, but it also taught me a question that students often will ask, which is now what?

That “now what” question is really important.

Hopefully, at the end of the day, I can pivot and bring these things in, but what I’m also trying to teach my students is the value of resiliency.

When some students thought that the election of Trump meant the end of the world, I had to convince them the American project will continue, the idea that you keep moving

forward. I had learned that when, in the middle of the fall semester, I tested positive for COVID and I had to figure out how to continue to teach classes when the reality is, I get up and I feel like I want to go back to sleep.

A lot of our students were also going through that. And students were encountering all of these challenges and they had to rally, come to class, do the readings, do the work. Again, it wasn’t always easy, but like everything else, everything comes with hard work. The values of persistence, the values of resilience are really important tools in my teaching toolkit.

MERYEM BELKAÏD: I don’t know if it’s surprising,

but what sparked questions is my relationship with time. When I was a teenager, a civil war started in Algeria, and I lived through it. And I think that, naively, I thought that would be the most complicated time of my life. I thought that I would grow up and go on with life without having any other big event. And so I think this pandemic changed this frame, this way of thinking—having to be confronted with another big crisis. Completely different contexts, not the same situation, of course, but still traumatic for a lot of people at the same time. And I think what was for me very surprising, as Theo said, is just the resilience of the students, of how very quickly for them turning to learning, having their assignments done, the readings done, was helping them finding a rhythm, finding solace, finding a headspace away from what was going on around them.

DAVID HECHT: All these answers resonate. I started teaching right after 9/11. I mean, 9/11 was very different, but it shares with the pandemic the fact that it was a kind of all-consuming news event. Theo, you mentioned 2016, and I can think of the 2008 financial crisis, or other events. One of the things that makes this one different, though, is that all of those are ways that the non-academic impacted the academic, but none of those other things affected the means we use to be academics quite as much.

And so that’s been, just for all the reasons that we can all imagine, just a really difficult thing to get used to. But, Meryem, you used the word resilience—people have pulled it off.

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE WINTER 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 47

We talk with Jamie Russo ’01, vice president of loyalty programs and customer engagement for Choice Hotels International, about the ways the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the travel industry.

Trust in Travel Travel has been really rocked by this pandemic.

How do you allay the fears—real and imagined—that customers have right now?

Perceptions about travel right now are intensely personal and can’t be dismissed— if people worry about something, it’s real and legitimate. Cleanliness has always been incredibly important in our world, but in response to the pandemic, we’ve enhanced our protocols, products, and communications with our Commitment to Clean initiative.

We adopted new staff precautions, modified high-touch interactions like breakfast, and gave guests an option to request housekeeping when they feel comfortable—all of that added layers of safety. Each hotel also designated a “Commitment to Clean Captain” to lead the process of incorporating the new protocols into each hotel’s operations. Fortunately, once someone has that first stay back, they see the procedures we’ve put in place, which dissipates their fears.

How has your company been able to survive at all?

Focus, flexibility, and speed. We always plan for the long term, but we have had to react very quickly in these unprecedented days. From the beginning, daily task force meetings enabled us to make decisions in real time that offered additional flexibility in hotel cancellation policies, in launching new promotions, and in identifying ways to support both guests and Choice’s franchise owners globally. We looked closely both at demand and at customer sentiment, and because of that, we were the

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first hotel company to launch a major national advertising campaign that spoke directly to what travelers needed and wanted in this time.

What’s different about the way you and your colleagues go about your jobs now?

The word “impossible” will forever be questioned now. Part of my role is to oversee our call center operations. The pandemic drove call volumes to an all-time high, right as stay-at-home orders meant our call agents had to stay out of the office—and at that time, they were unable to take calls from home. Our team worked around the clock on solutions that would have been considered impossible just days before. It showed us what we could do together.

Are there changes as a result of all this that might be positive for the hotel industry?

America has so much to offer right here in our backyard, and families are realizing that accessible, local trips have some advantages over far-flung vacations requiring air travel. We are seeing a return to the traditional family road trip, and I think that will be positive for the industry and for families.

How do you keep things personal in a time already distanced by digital interaction that is now distanced by necessity as well?

We want our guests to make a long-term connection with our brand. Data, predictive modeling, and digital touchpoints in some ways help us be more personal by giving us “micro-moments” we did not have before. When guests search for a hotel, check their loyalty points balance, or

engage with our app, we have the opportunity to connect, and we try to do that by giving them offers or content that our data has given us reason to believe they want. Doing it the right way makes the journey easier, earns trust, and ultimately more business.

Was there anything you learned at Bowdoin that you draw on still?

Curiosity. Bowdoin teaches you to follow your interests and, while the result is important, when you are curious, you unlock so many adjacent possible ideas.

What Bowdoin memories stand out for you?

Engaging professors, studying in the stacks, getting coffee in the Union, playing sports, and planning campus events at Baxter House led to lifelong relationships. Twelve of us around the country still get together at least once a year.

But the most important moments at Bowdoin formed my family. I met my wife (Allison Farmer Russo ’01) at Bowdoin, and her twin sister (Sarah Farmer Curran ’01) married my freshman year roommate (Peter Curran ’01).

Maine is now a regular vacation spot for us all, and that keeps Bowdoin memories alive.

Jamie Russo ’01, who majored in economics and Spanish at Bowdoin, lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife, Allison Farmer Russo ’01, and their two children. Prior to his position at Choice Hotels International, he was a vice president at American Express.

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

PHOTO: D.A. PETERSON

Whispering Pines

Convergences How the Pitman shorthand system led to the invention of the fountain pen at Bowdoin.

DURING THE MONTHS of the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve found opportunities to sort through boxes and closets, and to reacquaint myself with some of the papers, photos, and other objects that have accumulated over the years. I recently came across three postcards written by my grandfather to my grandmother in the early 1930s while he was on hiking trips in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

Written with a fountain pen in his familiar hand, a few words (“Mt. Washington,” “Winnipesaukee,” “3:00”) were sprinkled within a sea of shorthand characters. My father’s parents had been sweethearts at Cony High School in Augusta, Maine, and had learned the Pitman shorthand system in the business courses there (to which they had added a few of their own customizations to express personal thoughts). Messages in shorthand gave them a measure of privacy from the eyes of the mail carrier or from the four children in the house.

The Pitman shorthand system was invented in 1837 as a phonetic way to transcribe the spoken word at a rate that could exceed two hundred words per minute. Within a couple of years of its introduction, several students at Bowdoin were keen to give the new shorthand system a try, including aspiring ministers Newell Prince and his brother William, both from Cumberland, Maine, and both members of the Class of 1840. Having the ability to transcribe lectures, speeches, and sermons was a valuable skill for someone who sought to preserve and study the knowledge and wisdom of others. As he gained proficiency in writing shorthand,

50 BOWDOIN MAGAZINE WINTER 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU

however, Newell was frustrated by the frequent interruptions to dip his pen in an inkwell.

Prince experimented with a number of designs before coming up with a workable solution in 1839. He engaged a Brunswick tinsmith to produce a pen that had a reservoir for the ink so that he could write continuously for dozens of pages without needing to refresh his ink supply. From the description of the prototype in a 1908 Boston Herald article, it sounds cumbersome—twelve inches long, tapering from a half-inch-wide top, with a flat steel pen nib—and required variable pressure to regulate the flow of ink.

While he was in theological seminary, Prince continued to refine the design for his pen, and in 1851 he patented the Prince Protean Pen, the first US patent on a fountain pen.

The new design relied on ink flow guided by thumb pressure on a spring that pressed on a flexible rubber tube that covered a slot cut in the metal barrel of the pen—a complicated arrangement that seemed to work. As pen historians have noted, Newell Prince was an excellent clergyman, supplying pulpits around the Northeast, including Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church pulpit in New York, but he was not a businessman. It was after he connected with merchant Thomas Stearns and manufacturer John Clark that the Prince Protean Pen, boosted by two patents in 1855, became the best-selling fountain pen in mid-nineteenth-century America. At one time Mark Twain wrote with a Protean Pen. Prince received a one-sixteenth share of the profits for his invention. The fountain pen industry underwent a technological revolution in the years that followed—new nibs of gold and iridium; barrels made of vulcanized rubber; piston-, siphon-, and screw-fed systems; and noncorrosive ink formulas. Other pen brands had come to dominate the market by the time of Prince’s death in 1887.

If you are fortunate enough to find a Prince Protean fountain pen in a trunk in the attic or at a flea market, you will have no shortage of potential buyers in the fountainpen-collector’s world. Once described as the ne plus ultra of fountain pens in the mid-1800s, it is now the ne plus ultra for pen collectors. The convergence of fountain pens, shorthand systems, and Bowdoin history reminds us that a handwritten note can reconnect us with others and that opportunities to unpack and reflect on personal and family history offer small—but meaningful—prescriptions for pandemic times.

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

ILLUSTRATION: ERIC HANSON

Connect ALUMNI NEWS AND UPDATES

DAVID D. DANIELS III ’76

INTERSECTIONS OF HISTORY AND FAITH My teaching and study focus primarily on the US Black church as a national and global phenomenon, global Pentecostalism, and African Christians in sixteenth-century Europe. We have this notion of Europe being all white, that it only becomes multiracial after World War II, but it was multiracial in the sixteenth century, and our discussion of both the Renaissance and the Reformation needs to be one with this broader view of the intercultural exchanges happening then.

One of the projects I’m working on relates to African Christians at that time, to study what societies in the West looked like prior to the rise of modern racism. Maybe one of the reasons we cannot envision a society after racism is because we cannot even envision what the world looked like before it.

A lesson I try to impart to my students is what I call the “fragility of progress.” We need to realize that the social progress that religion had a role in bringing about is very fragile, and that, just as we have historical progress, we’re going to have historical regress. I’m not a historical determinist—I do not think that something had to happen. I think something happens because of the role of human agency in bringing it about. I hope that helps my students not feel that they must just resign themselves to fate. We can be agents of social change, and congregations can be agents of social change, in our society.

For more of our interview with David, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.

PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER ARTIST_CREDITRECORD

David D. Daniels III ’76, who earned his doctorate in church history, is Henry Winters Luce Professor of World Christianity at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, where he has been on the faculty since 1987.

Connect

1948

Willis Barnstone, poet, translator, biblical scholar, memoirist, and artist, is the author of eighty volumes. His latest, Portraits of Poets & Magic Couplets, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton. For the collection, he painted some 300 portraits of poets from Sappho to today, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Class of 1825.

Portraits of 1825 classmates Nathaniel Hawthorne (left) and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (right) by author and artist Willis Barnstone ’48.

His forthcoming collection, Portraits of Poets & Magic Couplets, will feature the Longfellow drawing.

AJ Holman ’81 and daughter Maddi, who he says was once the little girl in Who’s Mostly Scared?, the children’s book he published last April.

Paul Veidenheimer ’86, John Pope ’85, George Pess ’87, Chris McGuire ’85, Steve Miklus ’85, Ed DesJardins ’86, Chris Harris ’85, and Mike Miller ’84 caught up with one another the 2020 way—via Zoom—in December.

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1964

Bill Thwing: “After an action-filled life, I decided it was time to record some of my adventures and wisdom (such as it is) for whoever might be interested. Three books published by Shires Press in Manchester, Vermont, are my first efforts. They are also available through Amazon and other online venues. I would like to share these with my classmates and the rest of the Bowdoin community. Open Your Eyes is a collection of poetry and song. Vietnam Days is a memoir of my military experiences from pre-draft innocence until I went wandering in search of a PTSD cure. It is written in the Japanese poetic forms of haibun and haiga.”

In the third book, Restless Days, as the publisher outlines, Thwing “records his adventures skiing from Tremblant to Aspen, traveling from Morocco to the Isle of Skye, living in hippy communes from Boston to San Francisco, and camping under the stars on Indian lands from Saskatchewan, Canada, to the beaches of Zihuatanejo, Mexico.

Restless Days is filled with humor, poetry, and astute observations about the state of the world in which we live.”

David Treadwell: “For the last three months I’ve been working on a fascinating flash fiction project with Anneka Williams ’21, a top

student from the Bowdoin Class of ’21. She’s from Vermont, a straight-A student, and is, incidentally, a fine long-distance runner. One of us provides the prompt, we both write a short story—1,000 words or less— to that prompt, then we critique each other’s writing. Then the other person provides the prompt, and so on. So far we’ve each written twenty-five stories, and we intend to do more. Sometimes we take a similar approach; at other times we go in different directions. We have both had a blast while honing our creative writing skills on this project. We plan to publish our work in a book titled The Short Works of Methuselah and the Maiden.”

1965

Bill Hyde: “I recently independently published A Lucky Dyslexic, a collection of fifty essays about my life as a dyslexic. Throughout all of my years of schooling, including Bowdoin and graduate school, I went to great lengths to hide my learning disability. In more recent years, I have come to realize the extent that it affected not just my school years but career choices and my path through life. I deliberately chose essays that hopefully are informative, reflective, occasionally inspiring, sometimes humorous, and always readable.”

1966

Reunion

James Blanford: “During the virus, a small gang of Bowdoin friends has been staying calm and carrying on, mostly thanks to the mad Zoom skills of Charlie Gurney. Though hard at work as Vermont’s specialist on substance use and aging, Charlie graciously takes time to arrange periodic virtual reunions.

Regular attendees include Ed Bell, a mainstay of Winston-Salem’s

Remember

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

Kenneth A. McKusick ’52 November 3, 2020

Frank R. Goodwin ’60 October 17, 2020

Richard N. Terry Jr. ’71 November 19, 2020

Harold N. Mack ’53 January 5, 2021

Theodore L. Gardner ’61 October 5, 2020

Thomas A. Edsell ’74 December 2, 2020

Irving B. Callman ’44 December 29, 2020

Raymond S. Petterson ’53 April 22, 2020

Frederick D. Makin ’61 December 27, 2020

Lesley B. Gimbel ’76 October 20, 2020

Sidney Chason ’44 September 29, 2020

Charles W. Schoeneman ’53 October 24, 2020

Robert H. Rubin ’61 October 4, 2020

Michael R. Davey ’77 August 24, 2020

Edward C. Drinkwater ’45 December 4, 2020

Edmond Goby ’54 March 21, 2018

Bruce A. Burns ’62 January 4, 2021

Daniel M. Joyce ’79 December 3, 2020

Alfred M. Perry Jr. ’45 December 9, 2019

Charles W. Howard II ’54 November 5, 2020

John T. Robarts ’62 December 26, 2020

Juanita A. Ferbish-Scott ’81 August 1, 2019

Paul H. Hanly Jr. ’47 November 23, 2020

John O. Kaler ’54 December 6, 2020

Anthony W. Cremonese ’63 December 29, 2020

Leonard D. Driscoll ’83 October 10, 2020

Sven B. Hamrell ’48 July 2, 2020

Leonard C. Mulligan ’54 August 18, 2020

Kelvin L. Taylor ’63 December 11, 2020

FACULTY/STAFF

Richard O. Whitcomb ’48 October 9, 2020

James R. Stuart ’54 October 27, 2020

Richard D. Mack ’64 October 18, 2020

George N. Appell May 2, 2020

John H. Littlefield ’49 December 14, 2018

Peter P. Clifford ’55 April 23, 2020

Neil B. Martin ’65 October 30, 2020

June Coffin December 1, 2020

Stuart S. MacLeod ’49 December 15, 2020

John B. Goodrich ’55 September 14, 2020

David W. Stocking ’66 September 27, 2020

Margaret E. Dunlop March 5, 2020

Richard G. Sagan ’49 September 3, 2020

Samuel M. Snyder ’56 October 3, 2020

Peter J. Dickson ’67 February 25, 2020

DeWitt John October 6, 2020

James B. Aker ’50 December 2, 2020

Leslie G. Leonetti ’57 June 23, 2020

Laurence E. Pope ’67 October 31, 2020

Betty M. Massé January 30, 2021

Charles T. Freeman ’50 June 26, 2020

Allison H. Roulston ’57 November 15, 2020

Earland A. Cutter ’69 November 23, 2020

Shirley T. Schuster October 1, 2020

Philip S. Bird ’51 October 2, 2020

Robert C. Foster III ’58 December 30, 2020

Robert S. Glazer ’70 November 20, 2020

Richard F. Seaman November 5, 2020

Clifford Stowers ’51 September 27, 2020

Richard A. Brown ’59 November 29, 2020

Wesley K. Canfield ’71 October 1, 2019

PHOTO: ARTIST_CREDIT

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.

BOWDOIN MAGAZINE WINTER 2021 | CLASSNEWS@BOWDOIN.EDU 53

Connect

Is your estate plan missing something?

Is it cobbled together and you’re not sure what’s amiss? Or, maybe you haven’t assembled your plan.

We can help!

Visit bowdo.in/estate_planning to watch our webinar and learn what you need in order to put a comprehensive plan in place. Other resources are available at bowdo.in/secure.

For assistance, contact Nancy Milam or Liz Armstrong in the Office of Gift Planning at giftplanning@bowdoin.edu or 207-725-3172.

T H E C A M PA I G N F O R B OW D O I N

T H E CA MPA IGN FO R BOW D O IN

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Action4Equity, despite a recent move to Charlotte, North Carolina; Ed’s little brother, Frank Tonge ’67, crafting flat-out terrific guitar compositions and wry observations in Longmont, Colorado; Charles Mills, still programming professionally, yet finding time to help with his California community’s Meals on Wheels (something we all agree we should emulate); and me, who pretends to look forward to running a 5K in the 2021 Wyoming and National Senior Games. We wish everyone a safe and healthful 2021.”

Wayne Burton: “In 2008, through former Congressman John Tierney, the late Senator Ted Kennedy asked me and Willie Duncan, then president of Taft Community College in California, to lead a national initiative to put in place the postsecondary programs for students with intellectual disabilities. This was to be his legacy program, special education in higher education. I was president of North Shore Community College in Massachusetts at the time. Over the course of that year we were able to get pilot TPSID (Transitional Programs for Students with Intellectual Disabilities) programs authorized in the 2008 Higher Education Act and, after Senator Kennedy died, got former Senator Tom Harkin to take up our great cause and get them funded.

We never dreamed the program would be as successful as it has become, helping thousands of students achieve their fullest potential despite challenges that would bring most of us to our knees. [In November, the Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire was awarded a $2.5 million grant from the US Department of Education Office of Postsecondary Education to create greater access

to postsecondary education for young adults with an intellectual disability.] You can’t imagine how gratifying it is that UNH is getting $2.5 million in support of programs, a ray of sunshine through the COVID cloud.”

1969

Howie London was featured in a November Boston Globe article highlighting his research into the impact of higher education on first-generation college students.

London, former dean and provost at Bridgewater State University, was a patient at Brigham and Women’s Hospital being visited by his doctor during morning rounds. He began to ask the physician questions about the path that led him into medicine—a path that began at a community college and turned out to be exactly the type of journey London had studied in others for many years. “Every single thing that I have written, every talk that I have given—everything— had to do with kids,” London said.

“Either kids who otherwise would not have gone to college, or the institutions that serve them, like community colleges, for example.” The two men shared their stories and made a connection that London said helped in his healing and that he hopes will endure. From a Boston Globe article, November 15, 2020.

1970

Steve Schwartz and his wife, Paula Mae Schwartz, along with Nick Wechsler and Matt Jackson, are producing the spy thriller movie All the Old Knives, a joint production of Amazon Studios, Jackson Pictures, Entertainment One (eOne), and the Schwartz’s company, Chockstone Pictures.

Based on the acclaimed novel by Olen Steinhauer, the film is directed

by Janus Metz and stars Chris Pine, Thandie Newton, Jonathan Pryce, and Laurence Fishburne. “The film follows ex-lovers Henry (Pine) and Celia (Newton)—one a CIA spy, one an ex-spy—who meet over dinner to reminisce on their time together at Vienna station. The conversation moves to the disastrous hijacking of Royal Jordanian Flight 127, which ended in the deaths of all on board.

That failure haunts the CIA to this day, and Henry seeks to close the book on that seedy chapter.” From a deadline.com online news story, September 17, 2020.

1971

Reunion

Neill Reilly recalls a Bowdoin coincidence from 1974: “The Bowdoin B sweater is dark black with a bright white ‘B’ emblazoned on it. It is as subtle as a Templar’s red cross on his chest. It can be spotted fifty yards away. My fiancée thought it was silly on my part to wear it three years after college. She had graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. She did not convert to the small school alma mater religion. She taught school in New Hampshire, but like most transplanted New Yorkers did not understand the regional identity of northern New Englanders, i.e., only trust northern New Englanders.

“She traveled early in the morning and drove twenty miles in the dark to her school. She liked to drive fast and encountered the police officers too often. They ticketed her. Her insurance company warned her that it would cut off her car insurance or put her into an expensive high-risk pool.

“I suggested we drive to Keene, New Hampshire, where her insurance firm had an office and try to get a favorable decision. She agreed.

I put on my Bowdoin B sweater.

PHOTO: FRED FIELD

She asked me not to wear it. We disagreed. I wore it and put a coat over it.

“We drove to Keene and could not find a parking spot. I dropped her off at the insurance office and went looking for a parking space.

When I entered the office, she gave me a look of defeat. The agent had stated that she would be lucky if she kept her license and at best would make the assigned high-risk pool.

Even that was doubtful. I introduced myself and shook the agent’s hand. I then took of my coat and the aforementioned sweater became apparent. The agent took one look at the B and stated. ‘That wouldn’t be the Bowdoin B, would it?’ I stated, yes.

He asked what year I had graduated.

I stated 1971. He then announced he was 1962. We talked Bowdoin geography for a while. Then he asked why I was in his office. I explained that my fiancée had driven too quickly to get to her school and had a few tickets. He immediately waved his hand and said, ‘No problem.’

He quickly had my fiancée sign a few papers and wished us the best of luck. Bowdoin 1, Berkeley 0. We walked out of the office. My fiancée looked at me and said, ‘I will never hear the end of this, will I?’ I smiled.”

1981

Reunion

Andrew Holman: “My classmate Charlotte Agell inspired me to write the children’s book Who’s Mostly Scared? in a time when overcoming fear is particularly relevant. It was also a nice diversion from following in the very big footsteps of roommate Larry Bock as an entrepreneur bringing bloodless, clinical diagnostics to medicine on a cloud platform.

Watch for immuno-autonomics and the first precision measure of stress coming to clinicians in late 2021.”

Shelley Hearne ’83

Catching Up

CLEAR FACTS Bowdoin Trustee Shelley Hearne ’83 is the inaugural Deans Sommer and Klag Professor of the Practice for Public Health Advocacy and director of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center for Public Health Advocacy.

PUBLIC HEALTH IS SYNONYMOUS WITH DISEASE PREVENTION—for

everyone. But in this country, we predominately devote our taxpayer dollars to sick care, not to keeping people healthy, well, and out of the hospital. If we want to rebound from this crisis more resilient, we need a long-term commitment to revitalize and reimagine our public health system. Part of the reason we top the charts in COVID deaths and cases is that we have the highest chronic disease burden in the world along with enormous racial health disparities. Most are preventable.

WE NEED TO ADDRESS STRUCTURAL RACISM and the living conditions that contribute to poor health with policies that improve equity and health, such as affordable housing, financial security, and access to quality education. I came to Bowdoin wanting to become an environmental activist. My Bowdoin advisor, Sam Butcher, recommended that I go to public health school. I remember wondering what that had to do with saving the planet. I graduated and joined the Natural Resources Defense Council to fight against pesticides in food. He was right—that is public health.

For more of our interview with Shelley, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.

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Connect

1985

F. Wilson Jackson, “a gastroenterologist from Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, was elected by a statewide group of physicians to serve as vice president of the Pennsylvania Medical Society (PAMED). After one-year terms as vice president and president-elect, Dr. Jackson will become PAMED president in January 2023. He will be the first physician from Cumberland or Dauphin counties to serve as PAMED president in nearly forty years. Jackson has served in several leadership roles with PAMED, most recently as vice chair of its board of trustees. He has also been chair of PAMED’s finance committee and a trustee representing specialty physicians. PAMED is a physician-led, member-driven organization representing all physicians and medical students throughout the state.”

From a Pennsylvania Medical Society press release, October 26, 2020.

John Pope: “Had a wonderful three-hour-long Zoom call with senior-year roommates and fraternity brothers Chris McGuire, Steve Miklus, and Chris Harris. Joining were specials guests Mike Miller ’84, Ed DesJardins ’86, Paul Veidenheimer ’86, and George Pess ’87. Great to hear that all are doing well despite these strange times.”

1987

New York poet Taylor Mali has earned the moniker “Plastic Bagman” for his efforts to clean debris from trees in his Brooklyn neighborhood and other surrounding communities. As featured in The New York Times, Mali began his quest two years ago after purchasing an extendable painter’s pole to remove a plastic bag from the tree outside the window of his apartment. Seeing how happy that made his wife, he

began clearing bags from other trees in his neighborhood. Eventually, he modified his equipment to be more efficient by adding some L-brackets to the end of his pole—thus creating the “Snatchelator.” As New York began emerging from the first pandemic lockdown, he offered his services at no charge to those who needed them, often bringing his two young children along. He averages five or six appointments a month, often stopping along the way to take down other random bags and even receiving an ovation from an appreciative crowd in Carroll Park. In addition to his duties as his alter ego, Mali has worked as a middle school teacher, performed on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, and been a member of four National Poetry Slam–winning teams. Since 2000, he has made a career out of giving poetry readings, lectures, and workshops. He has published five books of poetry and a volume of essays titled What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World. He says he will continue his mission of ridding urban trees of garbage, offering a quote from the philosopher Edmund Burke: “Nobody made a greater mistake in life than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.” From a New York Times article, January 7, 2021.

countries. The webinars were free and featured specific instructional strategies to help teachers. I’m the new chief academic officer for Learners Edge/Teaching Channel, the sponsors of the webinars.”

1991

1993

Reunion

Wendy Warford Amato: “Recently, I had the pleasure of moderating two series of webinars supporting educators in distance teaching. One was in collaboration with the authors of The Distance Learning Playbook, Grades K-12.

The other was in collaboration with Doug Lemov and the Teach Like a Champion team. We had over eleven thousand people register and had attendees from over forty

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“Seeing how happy that made his wife, he began clearing bags from other trees in his neighborhood.”

—FROM A NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE ABOUT “PLASTIC BAGMAN” TAYLOR MALI ’87, WHO CLEANS TREES WITH A HOMEMADE “SNATCHELATOR.”

Darren Hersh and Joe Bertagna “have self-published Revisiting Goaltending: A Complementing Guide to Today’s Teaching, a unique new tool to help ice hockey goalies and coaches understand how the position should be played. Bertagna and Hersh, who both played and coached at the professional ranks, take on such topics as depth, predictability, and reading plays in this sixty-four-page paperback that will serve as a good complement

to today’s private goalie coach culture. Joe is committing $1.00 from the sale of each book to the Travis Roy Foundation. A limited number is now available.” From bertagnagoaltending.com.

Jennifer Hockenbery: “I took a new job as dean of the division of humanities at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin. My new book, Wisdom’s Friendly Heart: Augustinian Hope for Conspiracy Theorists and Skeptics, was published by Cascade in October 2020.”

1996

Reunion

David Lehanski, an executive vice president with the NHL, was interviewed recently for his role in the development of the new

ILLUSTRATION: ERIC HANSON

high-tech hockey puck that debuted in January and will eventually be used in all of the league’s thirty-one arenas. The space-age pucks are part of the league’s unveiling of its long-anticipated Puck and Player Tracking technology for use in broadcasts and other applications.

Developed over the past seven to eight years, it will look and sound the same as the traditional model—including team logos—but will be fitted with a tiny embedded battery, a circuit board roughly the size of a half-dollar, and six inch-long tubes that emit infrared light at sixty pulses per second. The lights will triangulate with cameras mounted in every arena, and players will be outfitted with infrared tags slipped into the backs of their sweaters. None of the lights on the players and pucks will be visible, but their every move will be tracked and recorded. The new pucks are produced in three stages across three manufacturing sites. “We tried to leave no stone unturned,” said Lehanski. “A big part of the testing was just getting players to play with it. How does it feel on your stick?

How does it sound when you shoot it? So it was hours and hours and hours of testing . . . and when the players told us they couldn’t tell a difference, we knew we were in a good spot.” From a Boston Globe article, January 2, 2021.

1999

Jeremy Litchfield has signed on to be an instructor for Capitalism for the Common Good, a new Bowdoin extracurricular program being offered through Innovation + Entrepreneurship, a student club for budding entrepreneurs. The program will be offered beginning in February to teach business skills that don’t just bring in profits, but

PHOTO: ERIC VOLKMAN

also boost the well-being of people and the planet. Over the course of five sessions spaced out through the spring semester, participants will work in teams to develop plans for “new purpose-based businesses,” explained Calvin Kinghorn ’21, a leader of the club. Kinghorn said he founded Innovation + Entrepreneurship to support and inspire like-minded students who dream of starting companies that help humanity and the environment. Alumni are being invited to participate as mentors or advisors. The program will wrap up with a pitch night, giving students an opportunity to share their ideas with alumni, classmates, professors, and possible investors. In addition to his role as instructor, Litchfield and his wife, Rebecca Darr, who started the Brunswick, Maine–based sustainable apparel company Atayne, also serve as the club’s advisors. The group has about ninety members, with many new members who signed up this fall—despite the remote semester.

From a bowdoin.edu/news story, November 23, 2020.

2001

Kendall Burman ’00

Catching Up

BEHIND THE SCENES Washington, DC, attorney Kendall Burman ’00 focuses on hidden threats.

I’M INVOLVED IN CYBERSECURITY AND DATA PRIVACY in a variety of

Reunion

Kelly Colvin “was one of nineteen full-time educators and researchers welcomed at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) for the 2020–2021 academic year. She is assistant teaching professor in the department of humanities and arts. Colvin previously taught courses on European history and gender history at the University of Maryland and Brown University.

Her research focuses on the intersection of gender, culture, and politics and how those factors impacted events and conflicts of the twentieth century. She is the author of the book Gender and French Identity Since the Second World

ways, both on the government side and in private practice.

When I worked as deputy general counsel at the Department of Commerce, I represented US commercial interests in dialogues with the EU, where they regulate data privacy very differently from the US. I also worked on drafting legislation and codes of conduct on data privacy and cybersecurity. In private practice, I’ve advised companies on how to manage risk and address compliance, contracting, and litigation challenges in this space. I found that one of the advantages of being a subject-matter expert is the variety of work that you can do.

THE SOLARWINDS CYBERATTACK [in December] was a powerful demonstration of how pervasive and global these challenges are. There is no defined battleground, and those posing a threat can be anyone acting from anywhere—and, the victims are not only the federal, state, and local governments, but the private sector as well. It takes an enormous amount of effective coordination in order to meet these challenges.

For more of our interview with Kendall, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.

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Connect THE CAMPAIGN FOR BOWDOIN

The Employment Accelerator Awards program was started in 2020 when it became clear that our senior class was facing a trying job market.

The program assisted nearly 100 students—everyone who applied received a grant.

Because of the pandemic, these same challenges persist.

But with your help, we can ensure the Class of 2021 has the resources behind them to succeed.

War (Bloomsbury, 2017). Colvin earned an MA in history and a PhD in European history from Brown University.” From a WPI press release, October 20, 2020.

Interim Principal Megan Hayes Teague of Mt. Ararat Middle School in Topsham, Maine, has been named Assistant Principal of the Year by the Maine Principals’ Association, which represents the state’s K-12 educational leaders.

Hayes Teague was nominated by the school’s former principal, who resigned in October. On his departure, Teague was named interim principal at the school, which serves Bowdoin, Bowdoinham, Harpswell, and Topsham in Maine School Administrative District 75.

Hayes Teague was among more than twenty people nominated for the honor this year. She received the award based on her work as a liaison to the community through programs such as the Parent Academy, and for revamping the school’s response to behavior issues in the classroom.

She will be honored by the Maine Principals’ Association at the organization’s spring conference on April 29, 2021, in Rockport, Maine.

From a Brunswick, Maine, Times Record article, December 3, 2020.

2003 Providing students with the opportunities and resources to land their first great job is one of the three promises of The Campaign for Bowdoin.

Learn more about the Accelerator program: bowdo.in/accel

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Brian Calabrese “was one of twelve lawyers from Hartford, New York, Providence, Philadelphia, and Stamford to be elected as new partners and counsel at the AmLaw 200 law firm Robinson+Cole.

Calabrese concentrates his practice on energy-related regulatory, compliance, and transactional matters where he provides guidance on utility ratemaking, energy regulation, energy transactions, renewable energy, and regulatory compliance. He is a member of the

firm’s environmental, energy, and telecommunications group and is resident in the firm’s Hartford office.” From a Robinson+Cole LLC press release, November 18, 2020.

2004

Emily Scott King: “I was [recently] conferred the Medal of Merit from the American Mining Hall of Fame. In addition to that, my company, Prospector, a new artificial intelligence platform for mining companies and mining investors, was acquired by Analog Gold this year, making me president and chief innovation officer of Analog.

We employ several Bowdoin grads and a Colby grad at Prospector and conducted demonstrations with [Bowdoin’s] EOS [earth and oceanographic science] department last spring.”

Ginette Saimprevil “has been named executive director of Bottom Line, a nonprofit organization that partners with first-generation students from low-income backgrounds to get into and graduate from college as well as launch a successful career. Saimprevil has held several positions in her fourteen years with Bottom Line. She started with the organization not as an employee, but as a student—in the third-ever cohort to go through the program—while a junior at the New Mission High School in Hyde Park. After graduating from high school and then from college, she worked in residence life for a couple of years before returning to Boston and getting recruited to work for Bottom Line. She began working with high school and college students, then helped open Bottom Line’s Worcester location.

A few years later, she helped open the New York office. In May 2020, she transitioned to being interim

executive director in Boston, and in August she officially became the executive director of Bottom Line of Massachusetts. The idea behind the organization is to stay with students until they graduate, mentoring them from high school through college graduation (up to six years). As the executive director, Saimprevil still has some contact with students but says she has a new appreciation for the impact she can have in her role overseeing the fifty employees in Worcester and Boston who support 3,000 students from the city and beyond.” From a Boston Business Journal article, November 5, 2020.

2006

Reunion

Ahn Do has been named one of the “50 Leading Women in Hedge Funds 2020” by The Hedge Fund Journal, a monthly magazine that focuses on the global hedge fund industry. “Do is partner and head of pharmaceuticals and biotech investment at Indus Capital in New York. She has led Indus’s pharmaceuticals and biotech research since 2016. Her team carries out proprietary research, including attending many medical and scientific conferences, to generate long ideas in innovative companies that have strong moats, and short ideas in incumbents that are being disrupted by innovation.

The geographic focus is China, Japan, and the US. In 2020, Do’s analysis of the spread of and policy responses to COVID-19, as well as nascent treatments and vaccines, has increasingly influenced Indus’s directional, sector, and factor positioning. She joined Indus straight from graduating from college in 2006 and was initially a generalist before specializing in financials between 2009 and 2016. She is a

Charlie (Johnson) Whitmore ’07 signals success after being immunized in December. “As my oldest would say, ‘Who has thumbs and just got the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine?’

This guy with thumbs!

Go get your vaccine when you can. Let’s fight this virus with science!”

member of Morgan Stanley Women’s Investment Roundtable and serves on the board of Vietnam Finance Society in New York City.” From a London, England, Hedge Fund Journal article, November 2020.

2008

Laura Small: “I wanted to pass along news of Jon’s and my micro-wedding this past summer. We had twenty people there, but eight were Bowdoin grads, plus George Hicks [son of Dan Hicks ’11], the second- (or maybe third-?) generation Bowdoin baby. We didn’t have a banner, only a blanket, so we made do. This was certainly not the wedding celebration we planned for, but I am glad to have finally officially married the love of my life.

We are still planning on doing our big wedding event next summer!”

2009

Melissa Locke: “Ben Wharton ’10 and I were married on July 18, 2020, at Alki Beach in Seattle, Washington. The Honorable Judge Julie Spector ’80 officiated the ceremony. My parents, Elaine and Steve ’77, brother Tim ’14, grandmother Lucia, aunt Evelyn, and friend Kate were in attendance.

Ben’s immediate family, including parents Justin and Karen, along with brother Jake and his partner, Ilissa, attended virtually.”

Michel Bamani ’08 and his wife, Elke Trilla-Bamani (Boston University ’09), welcomed their second child, Lucas, on December 23.

Michel says that big sister Valentina is excited and both kids love wearing their Polar Bear outfits.

2010

Elise Selinger: “My beautiful wife, Jessica Finkel, and I were married in a small ceremony in Brookline, Massachusetts, on July 25, 2020. As for many of our classmates, it was very important for us to do our part to keep our friends and loved ones safe. My dad, H. Andrew Selinger ’79, was with us, so at least I was able to get in one

Vincent LaRovere ’18 proposed to Cassandra Fibbe this Christmas season. They were engaged in front of the Boston Public Library with a wedding date set for the winter of 2022!

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Connect Viraj Gandhi ’14

picture with another Polar Bear!

We look forward to celebrating with more Bowdoin classmates when COVID is behind us!”

2011

Catching Up

DRAGON SLAYER Viraj Gandhi ’14 battles preconceived notions and explores the unknown as his first film, When Planets Mate, makes the festival rounds.

I SECRETLY OBSESSED OVER ART, I just never had the courage to make the change because of the pressure I put upon myself to become a doctor. In my junior year, I accomplished my first creative feat: I authored and published two historical medical articles in the Journal of Neurosurgery and World Neurosurgery.

It was my first opportunity to tell a story—that’s when it clicked that creativity would be my lifelong pursuit.

AT THE HEART OF MY CREATIVE PRACTICE is my spiritual practice.

I’m a Nichiren Buddhist, and the vibrational relationship between intent and vocalization enlightened me to how physics and spirituality are far more kin than foe. As the wall between science and spirituality melted, I began to work on When Planets Mate, a thesis on creation and destruction—both at the macro level of mythology and universe and the micro level of life at the crossroads of science, spirituality, and identity.

DOING SOMETHING DIFFERENT isn’t often encouraged, so learning how to believe in the foundations of my own individuality was a dragon I battled. This film was an experiment with a lot of variables, so I learned to trust the process, despite how unpredictable, frustrating, and nonsensical it often seemed.

For more of our interview with Viraj, visit bowdoin.edu/magazine.

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Reunion

Houston Kraft has published his first book, Deep Kindness: A Revolutionary Guide for the Way We Think, Talk, and Act in Kindness (Simon & Schuster). Kraft is a kindness advocate and cofounder of the nonprofit Character Strong, which works with thousands of schools across the US and internationally to create and promote educational content that teaches compassion and empathy.

“That distinction between nice versus kind is a profound one,” said Kraft in a recent interview with CNN. “Most of our world would say that they’re kind, when they’re actually just being nice. ‘Nice’ doesn’t require nearly as much of us. ‘Nice’ happens when it’s convenient, when it’s comfortable.

The sort of kindness we need right now requires a lot more listening, a lot more discipline, a lot more sacrifice, and quite a bit of discomfort.”

He added, “My call for us collectively as a culture is to have the courage to care even though the risks on the far side are scary. We need people who are willing to face that not fearlessly, but courageously, in order to heal a world desperate for more compassion.” From a CNN Health online interview, October 25, 2020.

2013

Sarah (Johnson) Tinker: “Adam (Berliner) Tinker and I became the Tinkers this fall, surrounded by a small group of family and friends.

Zina Huxley-Reicher married us with love and support from Kerry Meltzer and Tessa Kramer.

Despite the circumstances, it was a total lovefest.”

In November, Bowdoin Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics Michael Ben Zvi delivered the seminar “What Is the Best Way to Pick a Winner”—a discussion around the challenges of finding the fairest voting method and, in particular, how mathematicians might tackle those challenges. The talk was part of an ongoing series of seminars called “Math for the Common Good.” The series, which was launched by the math department in September, included four events this semester and featured Bowdoin faculty and visiting speakers discussing a variety of subjects from politics to public health to the ethics of algorithms. The aim, said Bowdoin Associate Professor of Mathematics Thomas Pietraho, is to think about how mathematicians can tackle some of the social issues of the present day. Prompted by the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, said Pietraho, math faculty members started having conversations during the summer over how best to highlight ways in which math can inform questions of social justice.

The series kicked off with a talk called “Modeling Infectious Disease Transmission for Public Health,” by Sophie Berube ’15, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University who studies infectious diseases and who for the last few months has been looking almost exclusively at COVID-19.

The final talk was on December 1, when Pietraho addressed “A Mathematical Perspective on Algorithmic Bias.” From a bowdoin.edu/news story, November 17, 2020.

2014

Lonnie Hackett has been named to the Forbes “30 Under 30” list for 2021 in the social impact category.

Hackett is cofounder of Healthy Learners in Lusaka, Zambia. Healthy Learners has developed a solution

PHOTO: ALICA MOLITO

that connects school-aged children in Zambia to primary care by linking schools and clinics, training teachers as school health workers, and harnessing technology for frontline diagnostics. The organization, started by the Oxford grad, has raised a total of $6.5 million, and with the government’s recent adoption of the program as its national policy, it’s on track to scale to all schools in Zambia, projecting that by 2023 it will reach one million students. Forbes has been publishing the list for the past ten years, highlighting “young innovators on the verge of making it big.” From a Forbes magazine article, December 3, 2020.

2015

Callie Ferguson was one of seventeen staff members from Maine’s Bangor Daily News to receive firstplace honors at the annual Maine Press Association conference in October. Ferguson took home two of the awards—one for her work on a news story covering the Lewiston, Maine, housing crisis, and another for an investigation into sexual harassment at the Penobscot County Jail. The Maine Press Association is one of the oldest professional news organizations in the nation. From a Bangor, Maine, Bangor Daily News article, October 25, 2020.

Hayleigh Kein: “On August 29, Alina Gaias married Joey Zuhusky in a small COVID-era wedding with immediate family and a bridal party. Each attendee tested negative prior to the wedding. A full celebration of the marriage will take place next summer. Alina and I are both Class of 2015. Larissa Gaias ’11, Alina’s sister and maid of honor, is Bowdoin Class of 2011. We wanted to share this special event with the Bowdoin community during this tumultuous time.”

2016

Reunion

Henry Austin was one of twenty-five artists selected from 900 submissions to contribute to the Portland Museum of Art’s exhibition about the turmoil and upheaval of 2020. The juried exhibition, Untitled, 2020: Art From Maine In a____Time, will feature work that fills in the blank and speaks to the uncertain and unsettled nature of this historic moment. It opens in February 2021 and includes an online presence for the show. From a Portland, Maine, Portland Press Herald article, November 23, 2020.

In December, Bill De La Rosa was named one of Arizona’s “40 Under 40” for his work on criminal justice initiatives and immigration advocacy. The award celebration, which was streamed live, was sponsored by the Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the Arizona Daily Star. De La Rosa is studying for his PhD at the University of Oxford in Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, as a Clarendon scholar, and he plans to obtain a law degree from Yale University. Additionally, he is a visiting scholar at the University of Arizona’s Binational Migration Institute, where he researches the criminalization of immigrants.

Last year, he worked in the Pima County Administrator’s Office on criminal justice initiatives, including policing reform and drug sentencing alternatives. Outside of work, De La Rosa is an editor for Border Criminologies and was a member of then President-elect Joe Biden’s Innovation Policy Committee. One of this year’s judges for the competition, Joe Kroeger, a managing partner in a Tucson law office, said in his introductory remarks that being nominated for this prize is a “collective recognition of influencers

and difference-makers in our community.” From a bowdoin.edu/news story, December 22, 2020.

Andrew Villeneuve “is one of a handful of young marine scientists preparing to undergo a year of policy training as a Knauss fellow, in a program administered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It was in the final year of his master’s in environmental conservation at UMass Amherst that Villeneuve realized he wanted to be better trained to bridge the gap between science and management, which made the Knauss fellowship an ideal goal. The fellowship places recent graduate students involved in marine and Great Lakes research in one-year positions in the federal government to learn how science gets translated to policy at the national level. Villeneuve will be working with the head office of the National Marine Fisheries Service within NOAA.” From a bowdoin.edu/news story, January 26, 2021.

2017

On October 22, the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives invited Pamela Zabala to speak as part of its lecture series “Beyond the Reading Room: Archives in the World.” The program features artists and scholars who have used materials found in Bowdoin’s archives to buttress and expand their research.

Special Collections Education and Outreach Librarian Marieke Van Der Steenhoven introduced Zabala’s talk, “Cooperate with Others for Common Ends?: Students as Gatekeepers of Culture and Tradition on College Campuses” and described the lasting impact of Zabala’s research. Her thesis has been downloaded over five hundred times from Bowdoin’s digital repository. For her honors project, Zabala scoured documents,

from issues of The Bowdoin Orient dating back to 1890 to accounts of Bowdoin’s diversification efforts and the College’s responses to events and debates going on around the country.

Currently at Duke University, Zabala is concentrating on race stratification and organizational sociology. Her research addresses race and diversity issues on college campuses; race and migration in and from Latin America; and issues of race, identity, and belonging. From a bowdoin.edu/news story, November 5, 2020.

2018

Sophie de Bruijn is currently featured in “This Zoom Life,” a comedy web series of five episodes, each about seven minutes long, currently available on YouTube.

The program explores the absurdity that a group of friends encounter when Zoom becomes the main form of communication during the COVID-19 pandemic. They struggle and find hilarious ways to deal with their personal, work, and romantic lives through Zoom dating, work meetings, online teaching, happy hours, and more. De Bruijn plays the love interest of the main character, in what has been described as “a lovely performance.” New, additional episodes are planned to be released in the spring. From an online DC Metro Theater Arts review, November 23, 2020. Side note: In Episode 2, the lead character (Jamie) shares his work Zoom password with his sister and says, “The password is ‘Bowdoin Rules,’ which is actually a hard password because no one can spell Bowdoin.”

Vincent LaRovere “proposed to Cassandra Fibbe this past Christmas season. They were engaged in front of the Boston Public Library with a wedding date set for the winter of 2022!”

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Connect

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Celebrate

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1. Laura Small ’08 and Jon Wildon (Union College ’08) were married on July 25, 2020, in Little Compton, Rhode Island, at the home of Laura’s grandfather, Wilfred Small ’43.

Pictured: Travis Dagenais ’08, Courtney Camps ’08, Ruth Small ’77, Jon and Laura, Jessie Hicks ’11, Dan Hicks ’11 (with baby George Hicks), and Jim Small ’77.

7. Z-Z Cowen ’08 and Ben Piven (University of Pennsylvania ’05) were married on March 7, 2020, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, New York. Pictured: Debbie Theodore ’08, Emily Skinner ’08, Ben and Z-Z, Andy Cowen ’92, Laura Belden ’08, Carrie Miller ’08, Philip Cowen (trustee emeritus), and Rogan McCally ’08.

2. Georgia Whitaker ’14 and Joshua Burger-Caplan ’14 were married on August 15, 2020, in Gray, Maine. Pictured: Georgia and Joshua with Justice John Woodcock ’72, who officiated the ceremony.

8. Kerry Townsend ’13 and Max Meltzer (Trinity College ’10) were married on June 8, 2019, at the United States National Arboretum in Washington, DC. Pictured: Sarah Johnson Tinker ’13, Kurt Herzog ’13, Michael Ben-Zvi ’13, Tessa Kramer ’13, Clare Stansberry ’14, Zara Bowden ’13, Kerry and Max, Zina HuxleyReicher ’13, Tess Beem ’13, and Jay Tulchin ’13.

3. Sarah (SJ) Johnson ’13 and Adam Berliner ’13 were married on September 12, 2020, in Hillsdale, New York. They both took the surname Tinker. Pictured: Max Meltzer, Tivvy, Kerry Meltzer ’13, SJ and Adam Tinker, Zina HuxleyReicher ’13, and Tessa Kramer ’13.

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4. Melissa Locke ’09 and Ben Wharton ’10 were married on July 18, 2020, at Alki Beach in Seattle, Washington. Pictured: Steve Locke ’77, Julie Spector ’80, Melissa and Ben, and Tim Locke ’14.

5. Alina Gaias ’15 and Joey Zuhusky (Boston College ’16) were married on August 29, 2020, at the Basilica Parish of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary in Southampton, New York. Pictured: Hayleigh Kein ’15, Alina, and Larissa Gaias ’11.

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6. Elise Selinger ’10 and Jessica Finkel were married on July 25, 2020, in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Pictured: Jess, H. Andrew Selinger ’79, and Elise.

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Here “Anticipation. That’s the first thing I see when I see the sunrise on the horizon. After the year we’ve had, after all the challenges, the twists and the turns, I look at the sunrise with a lot of anticipation. Our new rhythms. New ways of seeing life and the ways in which we are integrating everything we have learned in the last year. After a long, dark night, there’s no better feeling than the first ray of light that breaks through the deep darkness. The ray of light that brings a sense of relief, that thought that the long night is finally over. I see hope coming up. I see our college, our state, our country, and our world coming out of this dark night resolved to fight for justice and equality for all people in a way I have not seen before.”

—EDUARDO PAZOS PALMA, ASSISTANT DEAN OF STUDENT AFFAIRS

“We’re having a brutal yet cathartic global lesson in empathy.

I really like the phrase ‘we’re not all in the same boat, but we are all in the same storm’ as a way to think more systemically about sustaining our communities—on all levels—and building resilience for storms, real and metaphorical. It is a mindset change, which can—with work—become systemic change to build better boats and harbors for all, as the storms are not ceasing.”

FOR INCLUSION AND DIVERSITY AND DIRECTOR OF THE RACHEL LORD CENTER FOR RELIGIOUS AND SPIRITUAL LIFE

—BETHANY TAYLOR, SUSTAINABILITY OUTREACH COORDINATOR

Reflecting on the dawn of a new year.

“This year feels different—given how little control we had over so many things in 2020, I am thinking a lot less about doing/achieving and much more about being. How do I consciously awaken to the opportunities of each moment?

Whether it’s listening with intention (e.g., to someone who is struggling, to someone with a different perspective), or noticing and examining my preconceptions and criticisms, or embedding a kind word into every email I send, or allowing myself a minute to fully enjoy the sensation of my dogs licking my face. The year 2020 convinced me that cultivating mindfulness and equanimity at a micro level can unleash sustainable positive impact at a much larger scale.”

—KATIE TORO-FERRARI, ASSOCIATE DEAN OF STUDENT AFFAIRS AND ASSISTANT TO THE DEAN FOR STUDENT AFFAIRS

“Living in Maine has been a blessing during the pandemic.

As much as I used to enjoy being able to walk out my door and to numerous beautiful places, the pandemic has made me appreciate how lucky I am to live here and spend my time here.”

—DAN DOWD, MUSEUM OF ART SECURITY OFFICER, FIRST CLASS

“Two thoughts come immediately to mind: that of Cadillac Mountain being of spiritual significance to the Wabanaki, and of the role that those leading for the common good play in the stewardship of both the land and people. Indigenous persons have lived on this land for over twelve thousand years and named Cadillac Wapuwoc, ‘the first light white mountain.’ Our responsibility as members of this educational community is to support the continuing stewardship of both through research, teaching, and advocacy. My hope for 2021 is that the year’s beginning brings a renewed call for stewardship by all who call this land home.”

—CARMEN GREENLEE, HUMANITIES AND MEDIA LIBRARIAN

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PHOTO: JOHN K. PUTNAM

A NEW DAY, A NEW YEAR The first sunrise of 2021 reaches the United States atop Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park in Bar Harbor, Maine. From early October to early March, Cadillac Mountain on Mount Desert Island sees the first sunlight because the North Pole is tilted away from the sun, which appears further south in the sky. Depending on the time of year, other Maine locales to first welcome the new day include West Quoddy Head Lighthouse in Lubec and the town of Mars Hill in Aroostook County.

Bowdoin Magazine Bowdoin College Brunswick, Maine 04011

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