The Board of Trustees met last weekend off-campus where it discussed the business of the College and then spent a day on a retreat, looking at questions relevant to the future of Bowdoin in a small-group setting.
The College declared the retreat?the first time the Trustees have engaged in such a forum in at least the last decade?a success. "It was very, very useful and very productive," President Barry Mills said.
The Trustees broke up into four groups and each group discussed four different questions.
The first question focused on the idea of the College getting better. The second question involved examining the values of the College, while the third looked broadly at what makes Bowdoin distinctive, particularly in terms of the school's academic program. The fourth question explored the consequences of globalization.
"Everyone talks about how the world is flat, how we now live in a truly global world, an international and multinational place?how do we think about that?" Mills said.
According to Mills, the goal of the retreat was twofold. First, it was designed to get the Board "a whole lot of information about Bowdoin so that they really had a better sense of what this place is really about," he said. But the retreat was also meant to give the Trustees, many of whom are relatively new to the board, "an opportunity to get a sense of what they are each about."
"To be an effective board," Mills explained, "people need to know and trust each other so that they can speak [their] minds. Not that they have not been doing that in the past, but it is always good to re-establish those relationships," he said.
Bowdoin Student Government President Dustin Brooks '08 attended the retreat, which took place at the Babson Executive Conference Center in Wellesley, Mass. Brooks found the discussions productive.
"I really enjoyed getting a chance to talk informally with the Trustees about things going on on campus," Brooks wrote in an e-mail. "It was really interesting to hear their perspectives and thoughts about Bowdoin, and I heard a lot of interesting discussions."