The Bowdoin Orient

My bucket list got a little lighter over winter break when I embarked on a long-awaited journey to Israel through Taglit-Birthright. The program gives young Jews the opportunity to go on a free 10-day, organized trip to connect with our faith. It was one of the best experiences of my life. I’ve never felt such a profound and instantaneous love for something—I was overcome by emotion and feelings of patriotism every day.  I walked through Jerusalem’s Old City in astonishment and celebrated New Year’s Eve dancing in The Shuk. I climbed Masada to watch the sunrise and floated in the Dead Sea. I reflected in Tel Aviv’s Independence Hall where David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel’s statehood nearly 70 years ago. I grieved at Yad Vashem, shook to my core by the Children’s Memorial. I laughed with newfound friends hiking in the Golan Heights, dabbled in Krav Maga and ate such delicious hummus it was as if I were tasting it for the first time. I can’t wait to return one day!

Upon my return from Israel, I’ve given a lot of thought to the nature of my upbringing and my connection to Judaism during college. Jews are perennial outsiders, representing 2.2 percent of America’s population. But I had a sheltered childhood identifying with the community of my heritage, growing up and going to school on New York City’s Upper West Side, one of the most concentrated areas of Tribe members outside Israel. I was raised in a strong Jewish family, exposed to the rich cultural and social history of the American Jewry. I attend synagogue on the High Holidays and my parents would like it if I married a nice Jewish girl. I grew up to the music of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. I cherish Philip Roth’s writing and the Coen brothers’ films. A Jewish upbringing has had a fundamental impact on my personality, perspective of the world and the people to whom I’m drawn.

When I made the decision to leave New York City for the boonies of New England, I gave little thought as to how it would affect my relationship with Judaism. So this is what it’s like to be an outsider!  You call that a bagel? I’ve made friends with peers who have met maybe a handful of Jews in their entire lives before they landed here. “Jewish” rolls off their tongues like an exotic word, which I am not offended by. On the other hand, there are those who find nothing exotic about Judaism. I suppose that’s what you can expect from any college drawing from a large, diverse national applicant pool. I’m not trying to assign blame, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I’ve never fully come to terms with it.  And there have been painful moments. Bowdoin’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a human rights organization possessing what I would characterize as a flawed one-sided narrative, attempted to make the College endorse a cultural and academic boycott of Israel per the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign.  I am a proud, open-minded supporter of Israel and believe in a two-state solution, but engaging in a conversation about this emotional, complex conflict on a liberal campus is like hitting your head against a wall. The petition divided the campus and felt like an attack on my very being. Let’s at least talk directly to each other and look for common ground.  As my grandmother used to say, “It couldn’t hurt!”

Even during my wonderful study-abroad year in Paris, I faced the same issues of being a stranger in a foreign, non-Jewish land. Sure, it wasn’t exactly a hardship to give up bagels for baguettes, and the broad, varied demographics of the City of Light felt much like New York City. But the facts speak for themselves: France’s Jews are fleeing the nation at record levels as surging anti-Semitism and Islamic extremism haunt the nation.

I fear the surge in American anti-Semitic acts during Trump’s presidency becoming the new normal. Trump’s alt-right chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, is a noted anti-Semite. Bernard Henri-Lévy recently wrote of the president, “He seems to see Jews as the caricature of the New York establishment that, for decades, took him for an agreeable but vulgar showman.” These are dark days and I’m searching for glimmers of hope. As I navigate my place in the world I want to believe we’re not as divided as it appears. I’m not going to give up pushing for change and I hope you’ll join me. I believe in the resilient American character which President Obama underscored last year, declaring, “We are all Jews.” It’s a lovely thought and I wish it were so.  Maybe good Chinese food could then be found outside New York City. But I happily settle for seeing Bowdoin Hillel friends who joined me on Birthright, smiling as we recall memories and inside jokes from an unforgettable ten days.

Gabriel Frankel is a member of the Class of 2017.

Polar Bear Nation scored a surprising and feel-good victory this fall, and no, it wasn’t on the gridiron. The educational review company, Niche, ranked Bowdoin as not only the best liberal arts school, but also the nation’s seventh best overall higher education institution. Students and alumni celebrated the news on Facebook—not only had we finally dethroned Amherst and Williams, but were also ranked ahead of schools such as Columbia and UPenn, Ivy League universities. As a senior, it’s reassuring to know that my future liberal arts diploma is appreciating nicely in the public eye. But upon the publishing of the rankings, I couldn’t help but think back to my Admitted Students’ Weekend visit in the spring of 2013. All the talk of the “Bowdoin bubble” was a scathing, 360-page critique of Bowdoin from the National Association of Scholars accusing the College of embodying everything wrong with a liberal arts education. The “findings” of the report, entitled “What Does Bowdoin Teach?,” were a slap in the face for thousands of students and professors who have found personal fulfillment, moral purpose and career success because of their Bowdoin journey.

Bowdoin and other elite liberal arts schools offer an extensive list of distinguished alumni as leading figures across a wide range of professional fields. Yet, I cannot think of stronger testament to the liberal arts’ power to shape a life than Reed College dropout Steve Jobs, the Apple and Pixar mastermind who passed away five years ago this past October.

Steve Jobs’ contribution to the liberal arts through his loyalty to innovation and the unconventional speaks to his genius. Jobs dropped out of Reed, an Oregon liberal arts school, his freshman year but continued to audit a calligraphy class. The Macintosh, released in 1984, would be the first computer to feature superior typography—Jobs directly credits that calligraphy class with the Mac’s multiple typefaces and proportionally spaced fonts. Jobs was never a wunderkind programmer, engineer or designer, but a visionary guided by advocacy for the humanities and arts in the tech world.

From the first Mac to the most recent model, the computer continues to be the go-to product for creative, literary and academic professionals and dreamers. Apple’s celebration of sleek design and clean aesthetic, user-prioritized programming, eye-popping graphics as well as multidisciplinary features reflect the humanistic approach that drives Apple to be in a different league from its competitors. Jobs spoke of Apple’s approach to success in 2010: “It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing.” Flawless execution of the smallest details was key to Jobs’ grand vision. Apple appealed to us to “Think different” in a popularized 1990s advertising campaign featuring the images of historical figures from Bob Dylan to Muhammad Ali and Alfred Hitchcock. The historic campaign’s words (deliberately grammatically incorrect) and image were a turning point for the company, merging the interests of creative and tech in a call-to-action that anyone could connect with.

Jobs’ success at Pixar was another critical step in his liberal arts journey. His purchase of the Computer Graphics Division from George Lucas in 1986 would form Pixar Animation Company. Ten years later, Pixar made the first and beloved feature-length computer animated film “Toy Story.” As The New Yorker reveals, Jobs’ background was in computers, but his Apple leadership principles enabled him to transform Pixar into a “movie-making powerhouse” that the studio continues to be today. Jobs insisted during the design of the Pixar campus that there be a single vast space with an atrium at its center, instead of three buildings. Thus, the animators, computer scientists and company executives could always be throwing ideas off one another.

The tech world’s ability to transcend the liberal arts is thriving now like never before. Good news, Bowdoin! The headline from a 2015 Forbes report states, “That ‘Useless’ Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech’s Hottest Ticket.” Premier companies from the likes of Microsoft and Yahoo to Facebook and Uber are waging their biggest fights over young, non-technical talent, particularly those with backgrounds in sales and marketing. Critical analysis and out-of-the box thinking are valued by Silicon Valley as a part to the larger equation of success.  A recent study from LinkedIn reveals two out of five liberal arts graduates work in tech. Tech companies employ fourteen percent of liberal arts majors at top-20 schools nationwide for their first jobs. These numbers would be unimaginable without the lessons learned from Steve Jobs’ faith in the liberal arts.

Look no further than Laszlo Bock, senior Vice President of people operations at Google and a Pomona College graduate. He revealed that “general cognitive ability”—the ability to learn things and solve problems—is prioritized foremost by Google when assessing applicants. The balance of coders and engineers with liberal arts devotees “build[s] great societies, great organizations,” Bock told columnist Tom Friedman.

We have all heard critical talking points of the liberal arts. Is a liberal arts degree a one-way road to unemployment? Are the humanities worth saving, and if so, is a Bowdoin education worth the hefty tuition charges? For all of the College’s academic strengths, even Bowdoin’s approach to the liberal has a tendency to approach the humanities and STEM concentrations in a divisive manner: peers label you as one of the two by freshman year and Bowdoin has two separate libraries for the humanities and sciences. Yet, the College’s faculty and students are also involved in initiatives merging the two fields and Bowdoin funding must continue to advocate for this integration in academia.

Five hundred Bowdoin students are months away from graduating—some of us will have a job or graduate school plans in hand, and others will be figuring it out. Niche’s celebration of the liberal arts’ values and its place in education cannot be understated. Regardless of one’s major or interest in Silicon Valley, Jobs’ celebrated values ring loudly for those committed to the liberal arts: holistic thinking, elite problem solving skills and expressing yourself effectively are critical in the workforce. It’s about “Think[ing] different” to seize life’s opportunities.

Gabriel Frankel is a member of the Class of 2017.

I took the announcement of Derek Jeter’s impending retirement at the end of the upcoming season as bittersweet news, even if he’s played professionally for over two decades. Baseball fans take for granted his clutch hitting and acrobatic plays in the field and his leadership as captain of the Yankees. But what really stands out is his consistently flawless character off the field and in the public eye. Whether it was his establishment of the Turn 2 Foundation to help troubled teenagers or calling (unprompted) the family of a Sandy Hook victim who was a fan of the Yankees, Jeter is the ultimate class act.  General Manager Brian Cashman summed it up best when he said that Jeter is the type of guy you’d want your daughter to marry.

But unfortunately, “whole-packages” like Jeter are a rare sight in professional sports. We’re at a point now when athletes are expected to crash and burn or erupt in scandal. There’s been half a dozen breaking scandals of one kind or another since I came up with the idea to write this column at the beginning of the academic year.  So it’s worth asking: Do character values in the American sports industry matter in this cynical age? 

While professional team sports unify many commendable aspects of the human spirit, they also represent a dark microcosm of American spirit. Athletes are encouraged and rewarded for aggression and violent behavior, starting in the Pee Wee leagues. This “bad boy” culture is condoned or even encouraged by many parents and celebrated by coaches and school administrators who want results (i.e. a winning team). Habits form and their personal lives are reshaped, which often leads to trouble later in life.  Domestic abuse, gun violence, DUIs, cheating with performance enhancing drugs and brawls are the usual ramifications.   

Sports journalist Frank Deford recently said that the “NFL is home to bullies, wife beaters, racists and, yes, some homophobes,” but he wouldn’t be far off the mark by widening his field.   The condition is made worse by the handlers and executives who look the other way when athletes go rogue. Like any corporation, professional teams strive to keep harmful information out of the public eye, but inevitably the truth rises up and breaks out. To cite one prominent example, the New England Patriots knew they had a rotten apple in star tight-end Aaron Hernandez, but it took an accusation of murder to cut him.

Yes, there are many athletes who simply are in it for the love of the game, but they are tainted by the same toxic brush that paints over their sport.  Many cyclists may be totally drug free, but anyone in that sport who does well is now looked at with a degree of skepticism that was unimaginable a decade ago. The NBA may demand that all its athletes wear a jacket and tie when seen in public, but it’s not the clothes that make the man. Metta World Peace (formerly known as Ron Artest), Gilbert Arenas, and Raymond Felton set back the entire league when they have run-ins with the law. So, if we accept as a given that a stunning, widespread lack of character and civility exists in a wide range of sports, we can also equally assume that it is only going to get worse. If we don’t start turning this around, sports at every level and age group will have all of the character depth of most pro-wrestlers. 

Fortunately, there are several actions and reforms that the sports industry can take, on every level, to stress the importance of creating athletic men and women of whom we can all be proud. Youth coaches and parents must advocate that good character behavior is as important as winning. Excessive violence on and off the field has no place and must not be tolerated under any circumstances. High school is often when bad behavior comes to light and teachers, coaches and parents must be vigilant in maintaining these standards. Some have suggested that maintaining a dress code in the classroom might instill discipline, but I don’t buy it. We have to go a lot deeper than changing what you pull out of your closet each morning. College jocks who violate the rules must no longer be tolerated. This, of course, is easy to say and hard to enforce, because the financial blood of so many schools are dependent on those jocks scoring touchdowns. The alleged sexual misconduct charges facing Jameis Winston, the 2014 Heisman winner, were swept under the rug on his way to becoming an NCAA superstar. Whether or not there was a shred of truth to those accusations, we will never know. Associate Professor Billy Hawkins in the Deptartment of Kinesiology at the University of Georgia recently stated that executives from America’s big four sports league offices must make programs to address the culture of violence that embroils athletes and reverse “character underdevelopment” that many pro athletes develop.  

The emphasis on good character in the pro sports world should extend to improved tolerance of openly gay athletes playing.  Earlier this week, Jason Collins broke barriers by becoming the first openly gay NBA player, signing a short-term contract with the Brooklyn Nets. And just last year, on a smaller scale in the U.S. sports arena, Robbie Rogers became the first openly gay player to sign with a Major League Soccer team. 

Comments by sports executives and pundits, behind a wall of anonymity, suggesting that Michael Sam (the star college football player who came out as openly gay to the public earlier this month) won’t be welcomed appropriately in the NFL because the game isn’t ready for a gay player in the locker room, are beyond preposterous. Those who defend this idea argue that the NFL is a “man’s game” and that these players don’t have a manly enough reputation to succeed. 

The color barrier, another civil right obstacle in pro sports, didn’t stop the great Jackie Robinson from becoming the first black player in Major League Baseball. Athletes and representatives from pro sports teams should take a stand and visit LGBTQIA youth groups in their communities to get the message across that a kid can be openly gay and still achieve their dream of becoming a professional athlete.

All professional sports leagues should mirror and extend the goals of the NFL’s Character Development Program. This organization prioritizes anger management and reconciliation skills.  This will not solve all the problems, but it certainly could limit the number of domestic abuse cases and DUIs that some high-profile athletes get entangled with.  These can lead to an improvement in public perception of character value in American pro sports, a possible domino effect for changes at all levels of the game.  

Alex Rodriguez, the New York Yankees’ superstar third baseman, is currently engulfed in a highly publicized trial against Major League Baseball (MLB). Rodriguez admitted in 2009 to using steroids when he played for the Texas Rangers. He has been suspended for 211 games because of his use of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs). He claims that the current suspension is unjustified and that MLB has a vendetta against him.

In spite of Rodriguez’s high-powered legal team and his pleas to the media and Latino community, there is no denying that these cheating allegations have destroyed his legacy. As a player, Rodriguez is undeniably talented and has enjoyed extraordinary success throughout his career, and it is questionable how much doping has inflated his stats. He still had to hit the ball. A-Rod is one of many prominent players whose drug use has tarnished their reputation in the Steroid Era.

Beginning in the late 1990s, the MLB looked the other way as the achievements of these superstars mounted.  Business was booming. Stadium attendance was through the roof. The top players’ salaries were unprecedented. It wasn’t until Congress launched an investigation, chaired by former Senator  and Bowdoin alum George Mitchell ’54, that MLB admitted it had a significant drug problem. In late 2007, the Mitchell Report documented the extensive use of PEDs in the game and the list of secret clinics that were supplying them. The public reaction was swift and strong and the integrity of America’s pastime fell to its lowest point.

A flood of books, articles, TV shows, and films marks the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. In these attempts to understand our 35th president’s brief legacy and its tragic conclusion, a reoccurring phrase is: “what could have been.” But there is also new focus on aspects of his presidency that have always nipped at the heels of his “Camelot” reputation—questions raised by his foreign policy agenda to combat Communism, for example, and his limited contributions to the civil rights movement. 

A New York Times study revealed a 50 percent drop (60 percent to 10 percent) in the past decade in the number of Americans who consider JFK our greatest president. Journalist Adam Clymer writes that the public perception of Kennedy “has evolved from a charismatic young president who inspired youths around the world to a deeply flawed one whose oratory outstripped his accomplishments.”

But for all the criticism now surrounding JFK’s name, there is an aspect of his legacy of his that needs no defense: Kennedy’s championing of American youths’—especially college students’—service to those less fortunate than themselves. In October of the 1960 presidential campaign, then-Senator Kennedy spoke to 10,000 energized students at the University of Michigan, asking them: “How many of you, who are going to be doctors, are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world?” 

Miley Cyrus, the 20-year old American pop star sensation, recently hosted Saturday Night Live, making jokes about her 2013 VMA performance and new album “Bangerz”, while even parodying her hit song “We Can’t Stop”. Cyrus' recent songs, skin-baring outfits and provocative performances have sparked criticism from a variety of media sources, critics and organizations for what some label as sexually explicit and racist material.

Nonetheless, I find the criticism of Cyrus unfair and unjustified. Cyrus has a unique voice as solo artist, and she’s free to express herself in whatever manner she desires. It’s time for her critics to accept that she’s no longer the young, innocent teen star of “Hannah Montana,” but an independent music artist looking to carve a new identity post-Disney. 

Two weeks ago, Macmillan House hosted a campus-wide “Wrecking Ball” party, with a theme modeled on her hit song; one promotional poster featured House residents fooling around a Photoshopped wrecking ball. This says volumes about public perceptions of Cyrus and the influence she wields over our millennial generation. Does everyone like her music so much, or are we just obsessed with the cultural fad she’s become?

The headline is distressingly familiar: shooting rampage kills multiple innocent civilians; shooter kills self or is shot as the SWAT team closes in. He showed signs of mental illness such as hallucinations and paranoia, a record of weapons, violations and violence. The media swarms to Colorado, Connecticut, D.C. or the like for a few days, then the funerals, the empty sound bites from the politicians on both sides of the issue, and finally the story and the people drop as the media moves on to the next story of the week. 

But the big questions remain unanswered: How did a mentally ill man with previous run-ins with the law gain possession of deadly weapons? Where did the system fail in protecting us from those who abuse the system? How can the public be better protected without exposing us to even greater invasions of our privacy and personal space?

 Let’s be very clear about what we are asking for, because advocates of gun control are a wide-ranging group. Many supporters simply want to see an end to guns of all kinds. Take away the guns, and the violence stops. That is a very lovely concept, but it is unfortunately not very plausible in a country where there is roughly one handgun for every man, woman, and child in the U.S. And that’s only handguns!