The Bowdoin Orient

What is a college president there to do?

Willard Enteman began his term as Bowdoin’s 11th president in 1978. Enteman was new to Bowdoin—a Williams graduate in the midst of an academic career as a philosophy professor. In his first semester at Bowdoin, he moved quickly to engage with two of the dominant political issues facing the College. He appointed one committee to look into gender discrimination at fraternities (in other words, the fact that many did not allow women to be full members) and another to examine the possibility of divesting the College’s endowment from companies involved in apartheid South Africa.

Progress was slow. By 1980, a three-sided conflict at Bowdoin had developed between the Governing Boards (of which there were two at the time), the Faculty, and Enteman. Fraternities remained male spaces and the College had divested from nothing. Another controversy arose over faculty salaries, as the College was forced to make tough budgeting decisions in an era of double-digit inflation.

During the summer, the Boards appointed a secretive committee to review Enteman’s performance. In October, the Faculty passed a resolution condemning the “corporate procedure” of the review. On November 10, Enteman resigned.

At the time, many students and faculty at Bowdoin were frustrated by the mysterious circumstances surrounding the conflict.

“The Enteman affair is exemplary of the way things are usually handled at this institution—improperly,” read a stinging editorial in the Orient published the week of the resignation.

The Governing Board’s review was published on November 22, but even then little detail was given about the specific gripes board members had with the president. For his part, Enteman told the Orient at the time, “There is a certain level of support a President needs to have, and I got to a point where I was not receiving that support.”

A quote given by Lawrence Hall, an English professor, to the Harvard Crimson at the time gives some clues about where the conflicts lay. Hall told the paper that the president had "tried to withdraw the college's investments in South Africa, delivered a pay raise that the faculty was promised a long time ago, and he insisted that women be allowed to join the fraternities,” and said that “The old boys didn’t like it.”

Enteman returned to academia after his resignation, taking a position at Rhode Island College and teaching at various other institutions. Thirty-five years later, the gritty details of his departure remain frustratingly elusive: Secretary of Development and College Relations John Cross ’76, who acts as the College’s historian, told me that he knows little about the events because the relevant documents in the Bowdoin archives are still sealed.

Enteman is retired now, living in Providence, R.I. I reached out to him because I was curious to hear about his time at Bowdoin and his departure from his perspective. He was kind enough to correspond over email even though he was recovering from a recent surgery.

“I should warn you that I have nothing nasty or scandalous to say about Bowdoin then or now,” he wrote. “I left Bowdoin as I joined it: filled with admiration for the very positive and nearly magical educational success achieved by faculty and students working together.”

We weren’t able to speak in much detail about his time at the College, but his dedication to applying an academic lens to every facet of his work struck me.

“I remember after one speech I gave early in my time at Bowdoin, a faculty member came up to me and said that he thought liberal education was like a religion for me,” he wrote. “I saw the divestment issue in that context. I thought if we were going to engage that debate, we should do so in the context of liberal education.”

In the context of the debates surrounding divestment now—and many other debates about the College’s policies today—there is something subtly radical about this idea. Like it is at many colleges and universities, the presidency at Bowdoin is as much about organizational and financial management as it is about in-the-weeds academic policies and ideas. Barry Mills came from a background in law, and Clayton Rose comes from finance; each has worked to apply the managerial skills from those backgrounds to the high-powered institution with a complex bureaucracy that Bowdoin is.

To their credit, both also seem to have worked hard to maintain a campus culture that takes the ideals of a liberal education seriously. But there’s a distinction between being a facilitator and an active participant, and your answer about which is better probably depends on who you are. Clearly, the facilitators have been able to accomplish more at Bowdoin than Enteman was. Clearly, someone like Enteman was willing to approach issues like divestment from a philosophical perspective in a way that his more recent successors have not.

Things that happened during Enteman’s brief tenure reverberated—and are still reverberating—in the years after he left. The College required fraternities to go co-ed in 1982, less than two years after Enteman’s departure, and moved further by requiring them to give women equal standing in 1991. In the 1980s, the College’s bylaws were amended to require a committee that considered the social responsibility aspects of Bowdoin’s investments. That committee was dissolved in 1998, but the debates over fossil fuel divestment in recent years have often referenced those about South Africa.

In a column in the Orient last semester, Maya Reyes ’16 pondered how little the College discusses Franklin Pierce and asked for “more conversations about the actions and products of Bowdoin that we aren’t so proud of.” When it comes to Willard Enteman, I have a different, if related, ask: I want Bowdoin to be proud of him and what he stood for as a president.

Many of the questions the College faces today—about where it invests, about the social inclusion of historically marginalized people—came to a head during Enteman’s tenure. Enteman may not have been at the College long, but his presence had a lasting effect on how Bowdoin approaches social and political change. However, for such a historically significant figure, he seems to be largely forgotten.

Think about it this way: it’s hard to go four years at Bowdoin without committing the names of most of the College’s presidents to memory without even trying. Their names are attached to locations most of us know and frequent from our first months here: Appleton and Hyde Halls, Coles Tower, the McKeen Center for the Common Good, and on and on.

The decision to name one building after any one person happens on an individual basis, but collectively they’re an important part of the way that institutional memory functions at a place like Bowdoin. A name attached to a part of Bowdoin’s physical landscape is not an endorsement of every facet of that person’s character, but it is an indication that the namesake is part of a group that made a significant contribution to Bowdoin’s past.

Presidents who came after Enteman have something to their names. Greason might be stuck with the pool, but it’s better than nothing. Bowdoin’s newest academic building is named for Edwards, and it’s hard to imagine that Mills won’t have a building before long. But there’s no Enteman Hall, or Enteman Auditorium, or Enteman Center.

It doesn’t have to come in the form of a building, but it should come from somewhere. We owe it to ourselves to reckon with the legacy of Willard Enteman—and the old boys who didn’t like it.

John Branch is a member of the Class of 2016.

As its endowment has ballooned in recent years, Bowdoin has joined a small group of private colleges whose endowments exceed $1 billion. Now, Bowdoin and its peers are facing questions from congressional Republicans about the operations and tax statuses of those endowments. In a letter dated February 8, the chairs of two House and Senate committees—Senator Orrin Hatch and Congressmen Kevin Brady and Peter Roskam—asked President Clayton Rose to answer 13 questions concerning Bowdoin’s endowment. Presidents from 55 other colleges and universities received the same letter. 

The letter requests that responses be completed by April 1.

As of last September, when Bowdoin’s endowment figures were last made public, the College’s endowment sits at $1.393 billion and returned 14.4% in Fiscal Year (FY) 2014-15. It has performed well above average in recent years, earning the “Endowment of the Year” award from the finance magazine Institutional Investor in 2014. 

The letter states that the goal of the survey is “an inquiry into the activities of colleges and universities related to the numerous tax preferences they enjoy.” It notes that despite “large and growing endowments, many colleges and universities have raised tuition far in excess of inflation.”

The questions comprise of four categories: “Endowment Management,” “Endowment Spending and Use,” “Donations” and “Conflicts of Interest.” 

Many of the questions asked in the letter concern procedures for determining how much of the endowment a college can spend. According to Senior Vice President for Finance and Administration and Treasurer Katy Longley, Bowdoin’s policies allow it to spend between 4 and 5.5 percent of the endowment’s estimated value annually. 

In FY 2015-16, 32 percent of the College’s operating budget ($48.7 million) is planned to be funded by the endowment. According to Longley, the largest program funded by the endowment is financial aid, 66 percent of which will be paid for with funds from the endowment. 

As a nonprofit institution, Bowdoin does not currently pay taxes on its endowment. For now, college administrators are working on answering the letter’s questions and are reluctant to speculate about what the implications may be.

“We’ve been asked to provide information to the Senate and House, and we’re going to comply with that,” said Rose. “There’s no [action] that’s on the table at the moment.”

This is not the first time a legislative committee has requested information from Bowdoin. Senator Chuck Grassley made a similar request of private colleges and universities in January 2008, largely concerning tuition and financial aid. Bowdoin was included in that request, according to Longley. 

Bowdoin made no direct changes as a result of that investigation; it was one of many schools to replace its tuition loans with permanent grants around the time of the request for information. For now, it is unclear what course of action the legislative committees plan to pursue with the information they receive. College administrators are withholding judgment until such a plan becomes clearer.

“I’d rather wait and see what kind of bill they come up with, and then we could say ‘Yeah, we think it’s good,’ or ‘It’s a bad idea,’” said Longley. “Congress is looking at all sorts of revenue sources, and endowments over the threshold of a billion are something they’re looking at as well.”

President Clayton Rose announced plans last week to hire outside researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Villanova University to conduct a study on the experiences of students of color at Bowdoin. In an interview with the Orient this week, Rose spoke in more detail about what the study will encompass and how its results will be used. 

Camille Charles, a professor of sociology, Africana studies and education at the University of Pennsylvania, will lead the project and be assisted by Rory Kramer, an assistant professor of sociology and criminology at Villanova University. 

The project is scheduled to be completed by May, at which point a written report of the researchers’ findings will be made available to the campus community. Rose said that while he plans for conversations surrounding the report to take place on campus following the report’s publication, he was not yet sure when those would happen or what form they would take.After the report is released, Rose said, an internal process will begin for determining which of the recommendations to act on and how to go about doing so. 

Rose said that Charles is being paid by the College for her work on the project, but did not give an amount. He said that he made the decision to hire Charles and Kramer independent of the Board of Trustees, but that the board is aware of the project. 

According to Rose’s announcement, the study aims to answer three broad questions: how students of color experience life at Bowdoin differently from white students, what policies and practices contribute to these differences and what strategies the College could pursue to improve the experiences of students of color. 

“Those of color in our community experience Bowdoin differently than those who are white; the difference can be profound and occurs in every aspect of our lives here,” Rose wrote. 

Rose’s announcement comes after a semester of events that have sparked discussions surrounding incidents of racism and structural racial inequality at Bowdoin and other campuses across the country. At Bowdoin, the “gangster” party held by the sailing team in October and a series of controversial anonymous posts on Yik Yak led to protests and wider discussions of the role that race plays on campus. 

“Without getting after institutional structures and really understanding the barriers that exist or the mechanisms that you can use to facilitate it, you will only make limited progress,” Rose said in an interview with the Orient. “There is also a deep temptation to react very quickly and throw lots of things at the problem without understanding the root cause of the problem.”

In response, Rose said, this project seeks to understand the racial issues facing Bowdoin in a systematic way. Charles and Kramer will be given quantitative data about the College to analyze, and will also make qualitative observations during in-person visits to speak with students, faculty and staff. 

Bowdoin faculty will likely be interviewed by the researchers for their perspectives, but will not act as researchers in the study.

“I do want to give Professor Charles the opportunity to be someone who comes from the outside and gains an understanding of this place,” Rose said. 

Charles, who declined a request for an interview from the Orient, will continue to teach a full slate of classes at Penn. However, Rose said, she plans to make visits to Bowdoin for “a bunch of days at a time.”

Charles knew Rose when he was a student in her department at Penn and she served as a reader for his Ph.D. dissertation. 

“She is uniquely suited among all scholars that I know or know of in the United States to help us. Her work on racism is among the best in the country, and she works at the intersection of race and higher education, and in particular has looked at liberal arts colleges,” Rose said. 

On Wednesday, Bowdoin Student Government (BSG) unanimously voted to pass a resolution in support of creating the position of Multicultural Representative, an addition to the BSG assembly that would serve as a liaison between the Multicultural Coalition and the BSG. 

For the position to officially be created, the BSG constitution must be amended. To do this, a third of the student body now has to vote—and within that group, two-thirds have to vote in favor of the amendment. Students will be able to vote from December 9 to 12 on the constitutional amendment creating the position online. 

If the amendment creating the position passes, each group of the Multicultural Coalition, which consists of 17 campus groups, will have one vote for the representative in early February, choosing from within the membership of any of the multicultural clubs.

“The Multicultural Coalition, and the student groups within, along with the Student Center for Multicultural Life do a lot of programming around race and culture,” said Evelyn Sanchez ’17. “We feel a lot of these events are attended by the same people who happen to be students of color. We feel that a lot of other students could greatly benefit from the events and would like to if only greater organizations such as BSG advertised them.”

Sanchez, who organized campaigning around the Multicultural representative, referenced the success of the events of No Hate November. 

“We also think that having the Multicultural rep be there will allow for these issues to be addressed proactively, rather than reactively,” Sanchez said. “[Programming] can be throughout the year and not just allotted to a month or week, not just allotted to No Hate November.” 

The proposal for the position was originally introduced to the BSG last year by Kiki Nakamura-Koyama ’17 and Charlotte McLaughry ’15. However, it was not voted on at the time due to logistical issues. 

“We got the proposal from last year, looked it over, reworked it, edited it to make it more relevant to what’s happening now,” said Michelle Kruk ’16, BSG’s vice president for student government affairs.

“Historically, the BSG has not been as diverse and has not been as active in these issues, but we do think by having a rep, we can guarantee that institutional, systemic response to these issues because we can hold someone accountable to that,” Sanchez said.

Kruk agreed, emphasizing the permanence that the position gives to multicultural voices in BSG.

“I don’t think that the programming we do around multicultural life is enough, nor is it sustainable. It changes depending on who is doing the programs or who’s on campus that year,” she said. “I want some permanent legacy here, to be able to say that regardless of whether or not we have a diverse body within the student assembly… there will be someone on the assembly whose job it is to bring these things up.”

Unlike many larger universities, whose budget increases are often due in large part to increasing costs of research, the vast majority of Bowdoin’s annual budget is devoted to the salaries and benefits of the College’s faculty and staff—those figures account for 63 percent of this year’s budget. 

Thus, as the College adds new positions and the costs of benefits such as health care increase, many see few ways to prevent rising costs.

“This is a really people-driven product,” Director of Student Aid Michael Bartini said of what Bowdoin offers. “Unless the product changes, somehow we’ve got to be able to manage this.”Financial aid, another area where spending has increased dramatically in recent years, accounts for another 23 percent of spending. The remaining 15 percent is dedicated to a variety of expenses like utilities, equipment and travel costs.

“With 85 percent of one’s cost structure being embedded in people and financial aid, it’s a real challenge to figure out,” said President Clayton Rose. “It’s very hard to dramatically impact the increase in cost or the absolute cost by fiddling around with [the other] 15 percent.”

As with most colleges, Bowdoin’s endowment subsidizes every student to an extent. For the 2014-2015 fiscal year, the College’s budget worked out to about $81,000 per student, or about $20,000 more than what students without financial aid paid. 

Schools have some discretion in choosing how much they ask students to pay because of this subsidy from their endowment. Some schools charge one fee for all of their students. Bates, for example, simply charges one fee of $62,540, without publicizing the individual costs for things such as room and board. Bowdoin, on the other hand, does not have an official comprehensive fee. Instead, the figure can be disaggregated into several individual costs: tuition ($47,744), fees ($468), room ($6,142) and board ($7,000). 

Despite this, Bowdoin does pay significant attention to the total comprehensive fee.“The discussion of the comprehensive fee is very sensitive. We take it really seriously,” said Senior Vice President for Finance and Administration & Treasurer Katy Longley. “We spend a lot of time on trying to strike that balance between what’s the right amount to charge and what’s affordable.”

Over the past 20 years, the fee has increased by an average of about 4.3 percent annually; for the past five years, the College has held that figure steady at three percent. This is a slower rate than the growth of the College’s overall budget and the financial aid budget (which grew four percent and six percent from FY 2015 to FY 2016, respectively). 

The result is that the proportion of the budget covered by endowment returns is increasing slightly. With the endowment returning 14 percent this year, this appears to be a viable strategy, but the long-term implications are less clear. 

Longley emphasized that the College works year-by-year to determine the fee.“There’s no ten-year plan of what the comprehensive fee should be. There are certain assumptions in the budget, and we’ll model those out, but there’s no magic number,” said Longley.

The process of choosing how much to charge is, in part, an evaluation of the College’s costs and families’ ability to pay; however, peer schools also play a key role. Antitrust law prevents colleges from communicating about their current fees or salaries, but comparisons from past years are a factor in determining the comprehensive fee.

“We do look at what other colleges have charged—not that it necessarily influences us, but we are mindful of what others are doing,” said Longley. 

In a group that the College uses to evaluate its fees including the rest of the NESCAC (except for Tufts) and other peer schools such as Oberlin and Swarthmore, Bowdoin’s comprehensive fee ranked third-lowest of 19 for FY 2015-2016. Its percentage increase for the same year tied for fourth. 

What’s more, Bowdoin’s comprehensive fee is growing comparatively cheaper: in FY 2011-2012 it ranked eighth, while the percentage increase ranked second.

Of course, with financial aid, Bowdoin students pay a wide variety of amounts to attend. Financial aid expansion has been a top priority at Bowdoin in recent years. In 2008, Bowdoin announced the elimination of all student loans, replacing them with grants. Today, about 46 percent of Bowdoin’s endowment is dedicated to financial aid. With financial aid spending increasing at a faster rate than the ever-rising comprehensive fee, Bowdoin is prioritizing accessibility to all students.

In spite of affordability in practice, a continually increasing comprehensive fee can be an intimidating message. It is difficult to quantify how many students are discouraged by the sticker price, but without a clear understanding of Bowdoin’s financial aid, some prospective students are likely turned off from the idea of attending Bowdoin.

 “We know from our experience that we are meeting a significant number of students who are worried about the cost,” said Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Scott Meiklejohn. “When you can actually meet with those people and speak with them, you can accomplish something and tell them about Bowdoin financial aid. If they never get as far as meeting us or asking the questions, you don’t have that same opportunity.”  

As a result, promoting the idea that Bowdoin is affordable and need-blind has been a major goal for the Admissions office.

“I don’t see difficulty in Bowdoin affording the financial aid expense for the students enrolled,” said Meiklejohn. “I think the bigger challenge is communicating the strength of financial aid program to students and parents who may be considering.”

Making Bowdoin affordable has continued to be an important issue in face of rising costs.“I think the big thing right now for us to think about is how we slow the rate of growth [of the comprehensive fee],” said Rose. “People need raises every year, healthcare costs are going up every year, we need to be sensitive to the needs of our staff and our faculty. But what can we do to slow the rate of growth down?”

With 85 percent of the budget devoted to financial aid and faculty payroll, the short-term options are limited. This year the budget for financial aid will be around $34.4 million, about six percent up from last year, according to the College’s operating budget for FY 2015-2016. Approximately 44.5 percent of the student body is on financial aid, which is funded by the endowment fund and alumni giving. The College draws a significant amount from the endowment for financial aid every year, and financial aid tops the list of categories of alumni gifts.

With all these various factors coming into play, it is uncertain how much the comprehensive fee will increase in the future.

“We’re going to be really digging into this in the months and years ahead here,” said Rose. “It’s a really important issue. A middle class family that is doing just fine—two parents that are working good jobs, if they’ve got one child or two children in college—those tuition bills, that becomes untenable, even at a very good middle class living. So that’s an interesting social question.”

As the 2020 deadline for Bowdoin’s pledge to reach carbon neutrality approaches, the College is both reviewing its environmental policies and embarking on a publicity campaign for its sustainability efforts. 

A new website for Sustainable Bowdoin, the College’s initiative dedicated to environmental sustainability and its pledge to become carbon neutral by 2020, went live last Thursday.“It has an improved visual design, but it’s really more about content,” said Director of Digital and Social Media Holly Sherburne at last Friday’s quarterly meeting of the Sustainability Implementation Committee. 

New features include a timeline with significant events in Bowdoin’s pursuit of environmental sustainability and a narrative video explaining the carbon neutrality pledge.

The update comes as the College’s approach to the goal of carbon neutrality has seen significant changes in recent years. 

Most dramatically, beginning in Fiscal Year (FY) 2014, the College stopped buying credits to offset its energy use.

For the first few years of the pledge, which came in October 2009, the College purchased renewable energy certificates (RECs), which were intended to offset the environmental impact of non-renewable emissions from electricity on campus. 

Director of Finance and Campus Services Delwin Wilson said that 35 percent of the College’s electricity is “green” in accordance with Maine state law. When the College was buying RECs, he said, they were intended to offset the other 65 percent of the College’s electricity use. This amounted to offsetting around 12,000 kilowatt hours a year, with an annual cost of around $35,000.

While these offsets helped to lower the College’s net emissions, they were criticized by some who saw them as a shortcut or a symbolic gesture. A working group of students and faculty members convened and recommended that the College stop buying RECs. 

“People thought, while it’s symbolic to buy them, we’d be better off taking the money and investing it in the campus. So that’s what we’ve been doing,” said Katy Longley, vice president for finance and administration and treasurer. 

“We thought that it made sense to use it to reduce our own source emissions on campus before purchasing offsets,” Wilson added.

Bowdoin’s net emissions rose in FY 2014 as a result of the decision not to buy offsets, but  the College has succeeded in lowering its actual emissions since the pledge began.

According to the College’s Annual Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory Update for FY 2014, the College emitted 15,813 metric tons of greenhouse gas during FY 2014. This was a decrease of 17 percent from FY 2008, the baseline year the College uses to measure its progress on the carbon neutrality pledge. 

Bowdoin’s stated goal is to achieve at least a 28 percent reduction in emissions by 2020. After that, said Wilson and Longley, the College is likely to resume buying offsets. 

“In 2020, we’ll have to do some big thing to reach neutrality, so at that point we probably will have to buy some RECs in order to be totally carbon neutral,” said Longley. 

An analysis from the Portland-based Competitive Energy Services, which is working with Bowdoin on its sustainability measures, projects that the College will have to buy 12,760 tons of carbon dioxide offsets in 2020 to achieve carbon neutrality.

For now, though, the College is focused on other areas. A range of topics were discussed at last Friday’s meeting, including last summer’s solar installation at Sidney J. Watson Arena, part of the largest solar installation in the state of Maine. 

While the panels were covered with snow for much of the winter, consultants from Competitive Energy Services said that the panels have still been producing as much energy as they expected.

The committee also discussed rethinking heating in student dorms and ways to grow Sustainable Bowdoin’s presence on campus. With its new website, Sustainable Bowdoin is hoping to expand its visibility on campus and beyond. 

“We took a look at sustainability as a whole—what are the messages we want to share?” Sherburne said at last Friday’s meeting. 

On April 2, DeRay McKesson ’07 came to campus to discuss activism, his role in protests throughout the country and social media. Following his talk in Kresge, McKesson sat down for a Q&A with members of the Orient. The following has been lightly edited for clarity.

What’s been your path to activism?

I went on August 16 [to Ferguson] for the first time. I got in the car and drove nine hours and went there. I put on Facebook that I was going and hoped that someone would find me somewhere to crash and they did. The person I stayed with after the first few days was a Bowdoin alum—a Bowdoin classmate—which was really important. You know, at the beginning I had no friends in Missouri, I did not know anyone well but I started protesting and I tweeted as a way to process. I needed to make sense of it to myself and Twitter was a way for me to tell other people, but also really tell myself.

Marginalized people always face this issue of erasure, and erasure comes in two ways—one is that the story is never told, and the second is that it’s told by everyone but you, the marginalized person. And Twitter allowed us to tell a counter-narrative about what was happening in protest in real time, which was powerful. Over the last 200-plus days we’ve been able to both talk about protests nationally and also tell those local stories. We’ve been able to keep the narrative even when the mainstream media may not be focused on the work. We can maintain the story and we’ve found that to be powerful.

How has your time at Bowdoin influenced your current work, and your understanding of the common good?

The common good is this understanding that you are to use your privilege and your gifts for causes greater than you are. I understood that at Bowdoin, the privilege of that education and that experience. The question becomes, common for who? Who is this common for, what does that look like, how do you push that? I think that’s important. I believe the Offer of the College implies that it has to be received, and there’s a reciprocity to what an offer is. I juxtapose that to the American dream, which is forced on people. I appreciate the offer being situated as such; I think the content of the offer is powerful, but I think that the message that an offer itself serves is important.

What do you think effective activism should look like at a place like Bowdoin?

Good question. One thing that I talk about is this idea of the story. It’s important to tell the story of whatever it is that you’re fighting for, especially in the context of a world where you are just always bombarded with messages. How you tell a narrative of why this issue actually matters to people is important. I think at a place like Bowdoin, it is particularly difficult because there is a general level of comfort that can create distance from actionable issues, because it’s generally a good place. So to your question about what productive social activism looks like, I think that protest is always disruption, it’s always confrontation. The question is, how does that live in a place like this? I think that some of it can be physical, like with the die-ins and stuff. Because the student body here is so small, 40 students coming together here to do anything is a sizable part of campus. So it can be creating new community around issues and sort of forcing conversations about things. Because this is a college, it could also be bringing speakers who talk about certain things to educate people. It could be exhibits. I think about those body image things that I’m sure still happen—using art, using culture as a way to push people to think deeper and think differently about work can happen.

It is interesting to protest with privilege, because even the marginalized people here have a relative privilege. It is easy to be comfortable here no matter what; it’s a place where you need for nothing. That creates a different relationship with the issues that people really care about.

How did you turn something you were passionate about at Bowdoin into a career?

My career was fighting for kids—either as a teacher, in after-school, or as a district administrator—and those things were really important to me. I think that if anything my advice to people leaving college who want to do social justice work is to be really clear about who you’re fighting for, right? For me it was kids. Those are the people that I’m fighting for every day. One can become so addicted to the fight that they forget the cause. One can just be so excited about the sort of confrontation phase that they forget the issue, and I’d say to remember to be rooted in the issue. Be as close—and this is the proximity thing—be as close to the work that you want to do as possible. And know who you’re fighting for. So that was my thing. And now I’m fighting for them differently. I’m fighting for them to be alive, whereas before I was fighting for them to have this phenomenal education.

Can you talk a little bit about the Mapping Police Violence project? How did that idea come into being?

Our focus has been on telling the truth, figuring out different ways of telling the truth, and then making sure that the truth we tell always empowers people, and this is that. So it’s like, we’re going to build a map that shows what truly happened, we’re gonna cut the data for people in as many ways as we can, and this is the first compilation of those two databases—the killed by police and then the other one—that we mashed into one. And we’re trying to make sure that we continue to tell the truth and empower people, which is why it has that piece by police department. You can look at gender, age, race—those sort of things are really important.

We rolled out a couple things. Wetheprotesters.org rolled out the database for chants and pictures of signs and those sorts of things. We stopped doing the policy stuff—we put it on hiatus—but that was there, those policy papers. I think we’ll probably do some sort of reading club soon, with protesters from around the country.

It’s interesting. When we released it, one of the first criticisms we got was, why are there not white people? It’s interesting, this idea that white supremacy always centers whiteness.

You’ve talked about receiving a lot of abuse on Twitter and other platforms. Have you experimented with other platforms trying to find a way to avoid some of that? Do you think there are things that the people who develop these kinds of networks could do to stop that kind of thing from happening?

I’m committed to Twitter. I love Twitter. So no to other platforms, and the movement’s not really on Facebook. I do get trolls on Facebook, but really, people troll my mentions on Twitter. If you look at anything I’ve written, there are probably all these people who are fighting in my mentions who I never see, because I’ve blocked like 12,000 people. I think it comes with the territory a little bit. The death threats don’t—I think that’s a whole different ballgame—but I think Twitter has acknowledged that they need to be more aggressive dealing with harassment and abuse, and I think they are making the right strides, they’re just not there yet.

Somebody made a game, I don’t know if you guys saw it, but there’s a target practice game, and my face is one of the faces on it, so you click and shoot me. And when I reported it, Twitter was like, well, the link is somewhere else, so they won’t take it down. So that’s not helpful. So I think they’re working on it. It’s slow, but I’m committed to Twitter as a platform.

What’s next?

We’ll continue to figure out ways to tell the story. I think that there are all these things around community building that we can do. How do we bring together people in the digital space in a way that is still authentic? Because you often see the digital space as being inauthentic, and I think that we’ve seen the digital space be powerfully authentic. How do we find or create the tools that protesters around the country can use to support themselves? You can start a movement, you don’t need an organization. How do we make that easier for you? How do we continue to create those resource banks for people? This goes back to the idea that everyone has a role to play. We’ve been in a place where we have been focused on how do we tell the story, how do we tell the truth, and how do we use this truth to empower people.

Nicole Wetsman contributed to this report. 

As Bowdoin’s President-elect Clayton Rose prepares to take office next year, several transition-spurred controversies have arisen at neighboring Bates College. 

Following the announcement that two popular deans would depart at the end of the year, the Bates College Student Government (BCSG) passed a vote of no confidence toward two members of the administration, President Clayton Spencer and the school’s Vice President of Student Affairs and Dean of Students Josh McIntosh, last month.  

“We students should be citizens at Bates, not subjects, and we hope Wednesday’s no-confidence vote will serve as a wake-up call to an administration that many students feel has been cavalier and out-of-touch,” read a statement from BCSG after the vote. 

Other administrative decisions this year have rankled Bates students as well. For example, McIntosh and Spencer came under criticism for their decision to end the school’s annual “Trick or Drink” party last fall. 

More recently, a piece in the Bates Student alleged that a mail center employee was illegally fired due to a disability. Bates’s Director of Media Relations Kent Fischer wrote in response that the piece “makes a number of serious, inaccurate and potentially defamatory assertions.”

According to Norberto Diaz, a junior at Bates and BCSG’s president, students are especially upset that the departures of the two deans, Associate Dean of Students Holly Gurney and Assistant Dean of Students Keith Tannenbaum, were announced at the end of an email from McIntosh about a variety of organizational changes.

McIntosh arrived at Bates at the beginning of this academic year. He declined to speak with the Orient. 

In an open letter published on March 9, Spencer expressed regret about the vote of no confidence, but defended the organizational changes.

“I regret that the Student Government felt compelled to take this action, because it suggests a gap between the perceptions of a group of students and what I know to be widely shared aspirations for strengthening the Bates experience,” she wrote. 

Diaz said that much of the controversy has been due to a lack of transparency between students and the administration.

Gurney and Tannenbaum “were two [members of the administration] that people saw around campus, who students spoke to,” said Diaz. “It didn’t really help that the student body wasn’t told in a good way.”

However, he added that he was optimistic about improving communication with the administration, particularly McIntosh, who as a new member of the administration has shouldered much of the recent criticism from students. Diaz said McIntosh’s main goals are to remake the school’s orientation program and create a more inclusive campus culture. 

“At the end of the day, he’s doing what he was hired to do. He sees Bates going in a new direction,” Diaz said.

Since the vote, he said, the BCSG has been making efforts to improve dialogue.

A referendum reorganizing the student government passed earlier this month, and Diaz has been spearheading efforts to implement office hours for student government members and monthly town hall meetings with members of the administration. 

“It all comes down to communication,” he said. “In the past, with all these events happening...it was mostly just bands of students tackling the administration. Student government needs to have a relationship with the administration so we can tell them what’s going on and how we feel.”

In the fall of 1964, Bowdoin’s president James Stacy Coles wrote in delight to a friend about the seniors he noticed around the College’s new Senior Center, the 16-story tower that would later bear his name.

“[They] seem to walk about with greater pride,” he wrote. “They have spontaneously spruced up their personal appearance.”

Last fall marked 50 years since the completion and opening of the Senior Center, now known as Coles Tower. Since then, many things have changed on campus. Just as it did in 1964, though, the Tower primarily houses seniors and plays a significant role in the cultural fabric of the College. 

Originally, the Tower was conceived as part of a larger program called the Senior Commons. In a senior thesis tracing the history of the program, Benjamin Brennan ’08 wrote that it was “an effort to bring about sweeping social and curricular changes at what was regarded as a very traditional school.”

This was a version of Bowdoin that would be hardly recognizable to students today: a conservative, all-male institution where the vast majority of social life happened inside fraternities. Classes were held every day but Sunday, and women were never allowed in campus dorms. 

The goal was to remake the experience of Bowdoin’s upperclassmen, loosening these social restrictions and emphasizing engagement with the outside world. The College felt that its seniors were spending too much time with younger students in fraternities, and hoped to bring them out of fraternity houses and into more contact with one another in the Tower.

“There was this idea that we wanted to find a center for communal life and intellectual life for senior men,” said Senior Lecturer in Environmental Studies Jill Pearlman.

To accomplish this, the College created new, interdisciplinary senior seminars that cut across Bowdoin’s traditional distribution requirements. They arranged for scholars-in-residence to live among seniors, and planned a new dining hall where they would eat together. Seeing this as an innovative, modernizing program, they wanted a physical structure to match, one where seniors would both live and study together.

Hugh Stubbins, a prominent modernist architect, designed the new Senior Center. While the building was the first example of modern architecture at Bowdoin, many of the College’s peer institutions, and larger universities like Harvard and Princeton, had built their own modernist buildings over the previous two decades.

At Bowdoin, students had long desired more modern facilities. An Orient editorial from 1945 lamented that “the only things modern on our campus are our toilets and kitchens.” “College campuses are architecturally conservative—rarely does anything new happen at them,” said Pearlman. 

When colleges do decide to pursue new architectural styles, though, the trends often spread quickly. 

“Everyone was getting their own modernist building after the war,” she added. 

Construction began in 1963. On January 20, 1964, while the fourteenth and fifteenth floors were under construction, an electrical fire engulfed the top of the building. Secretary of Development and College Relations John Cross ’76 was then a fourth-grader living in Brunswick. In 2011, he discussed his memories of the fire in a piece for the Bowdoin Daily Sun.

“We slogged through the slush left by rains that had fallen on heavy snow and joined a crowd of students and neighbors in staring up at the tower and the fire crews that battled to contain the blaze,” he wrote.

Surprisingly, the fire, whose repairs cost $200,000, did not much delay construction. The building opened on schedule for the fall semester in 1964. At the time, it was the tallest building in Maine (it now ranks second, after Portland’s Franklin Towers). 

While the physical component of the Senior Center program appeared to be a success, many students saw it as an effort to weaken fraternities and feelings about the academic components were mixed. The College soon struggled to fill senior seminars. 

Following the resignation of the Center’s original director, history professor Bill Whiteside, in 1970, the decrease in interest among seniors meant that younger students were occupying many of its rooms. 

“It was kind of a model that worked for a little while… But by the time I was a senior, it wasn’t exclusively a residence for seniors any more,” said Cross. “It became sort of another dorm.”

By 1980, with the curriculum largely defunct and the building populated by students from a range of class years, the Senior Center was renamed Coles Tower, after the man who had presided over its creation. 

Cross said the name change was “a recognition that the Senior Center program had been replaced by a more flexible curriculum.”

Coles Tower Today

Having outlived its original purpose and numerous subsequent architectural movements, Coles Tower fills a far different role than it did at its creation.

“It still stands out. It’s kind of on its own little island,” Pearlman said. “Like many modernist buildings, it hasn’t aged very well.” 

Pearlman was optimistic, though, about the renovations currently taking place.

Today, the Tower is central to the social life of many students in a way that few in the heyday of fraternities would have anticipated. 

“The tower is the hub of social life for a lot of seniors,” wrote Matt Friedland ’15, a Tower resident, in an email to the Orient. “It houses a solid amount of the senior class, so a lot of events both during the week and on the weekends happen in the tower.”

“It would be the place from which the Bowdoin Bubble, if it existed, would originate,” he wrote.“It’s definitely a social hotspot,” said Lela Garner ’16, another resident of the Tower. “It’s really easy to access other rooms, not like in Brunswick or the freshman dorms where you have to go and knock on everyone’s door.” 

However, the social atmosphere dissuades some students from living in Coles as well.

“It seems a bit too chaotic and hectic for me. I need a quiet space,” said Bintou Kunjo ’15, who lives on School Street. “I think it’s party central.”

While the senior seminars of the 1960s are long gone, classes are still taught at the top floor of the Tower. Visiting Assistant Professor of English Morten Hansen has chosen the classroom in each of his two semesters at Bowdoin.

“The view provides a pretty backdrop and counterpoint to discussions and lectures without being a distraction,” he wrote in an email to the Orient. “My sense is that most students like having classes up there overlooking the campus and the surrounding area.”

Many residents appreciate the building’s social life considerably more than its architecture, however. 

“I didn’t love it at first, because it felt quite institutional,” said Garner. “When I walk into my home, I don’t want to see cement walls and lots of doors.”

“It’s definitely as comfortable and home-y as you make it, but you have to put in a good amount of effort to make it look nice on the inside,” wrote Hallie Bates ’15 in an email to the Orient. 

Despite reservations among students about the building itself, the Tower’s status as a central location for seniors seems to be having a resurgence. 

In Fall 2006, 22 percent of the apartments in the Tower were occupied by quads of all seniors. This past fall, that number had risen to 70 percent. 

Associate Director of Housing Operations Lisa Rendall said that it is typically one of the first housing options to fill up in the lottery, along with Harpswell Apartments and the quads in Chamberlain Hall. 

President Barry Mills has recommended that the College begin the spring semester after the Martin Luther King Jr. Day when planning future academic calendars.

Mills sent an email to the campus community last Thursday detailing the recommendation. With the holiday scheduled to fall during winter break for the next four years, Mills’ proposed change to the calendar would begin in 2020. 

Currently, the College begins the spring semester on the holiday three out of every seven years, falling on the final week of winter break in the other four.

Mills said in an interview with the Orient that he had been thinking about the change for a number of years. However, the political climate on campus played a role in the timing of his recommendation.

“As I was thinking about what we’ve seen over the last number of months, the feeling that people have towards Martin Luther King Jr. Day has really intensified and the day has taken on more than just being a national day of remembrance,” Mills said. “It’s a national day of service in a lot of ways.”

In a follow-up email to faculty and students, Dean for Academic Affairs Cristle Collins Judd reiterated the College’s policy regarding the holiday. Bowdoin’s course catalogue specifies that, as with major religious holidays, students are allowed to miss classes or exams for Martin Luther King Jr. Day observances.

This year, the College held several events for the holiday: a commemoration breakfast, a children’s event in Hawthorne-Longfellow Library, two panels in a course taught by Consortium for Faculty Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in Government Cory Gooding, and a performance by civil rights activists and musicians Bernice Johnson Reagon and her daughter Toshi.

During the performance, Toshi playfully criticized the school for holding classes on the holiday, and called for a wider variety of programming for the holiday.

“A lot of holidays we have are so far off the mark from what we would like them to do, but this one has so much potential to bring up so many issues,” she said.

“I don’t know why you would bring students to school on MLK Day unless you were giving them the opportunity to express all of the different movements that are concerning them that they would like to give voice to,” she continued.

Ashley Bomboka ’16 was among the students who chose not to attend classes. She attended the breakfast, participated in a panel, and attended the concert.

“It was an educational experience—I’m learning a lot more about his work, his change over time, and the way that we’ve appropriated his life to fit our civil rights narrative,” she said. She added that her professors were “very supportive” of her decision not to attend class.Bomboka said she supported the recommendation from Mills.

“It makes sense to honor what [King] did and where he pushed us to go as a country—how he was able to be a role model for so many other activists,” she said.

Some students felt that the change was overdue.

“I’m pretty excited about it. I think it took long enough for it to happen,” said Michelle Kruk ’16, who helped organize campus responses to the non-indictments of the officers in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases last semester.

“I’m disappointed that it’s not going to happen during my time here, because I think the College tends to do what’s easy a lot of the time,” she added. “The better alternative would have been to just have the day off this year.”

Most of Bowdoin’s NESCAC peers without a winter term are given the day off already, including Amherst, Connecticut College, Hamilton, Trinity and Tufts. Bates holds themed workshops in place of classes, while at Wesleyan the day is used for enrollment for the spring semester.

Mills acknowledged that the policies of other colleges factored into his decision.

“A whole lot of other schools have decided to start the day after,” he said. 

Ultimately, Bowdoin’s Calendar Committee will make the final decision.

“I decided not to declare this as some sort of edict, because the calendar is something that many people on the faculty and staff consider carefully, and any modifications to the calendar attract a lot of attention,” Mills said.

Mills said that while he would not support mandatory events in place of classes during the holiday, he did see the potential for College-organized activities on the holiday in lieu of classes.

“We sometimes forget that Martin Luther King Jr. Day has really been designated as a national day of service, so if everyone were back on campus and classes weren’t starting until the next day, one could see the McKeen Center organizing another Common Good Day where students reach out to the community,” he said.

The Calendar Committee will be meeting this spring to decide on future changes to the academic calendar.

When Galaxie 500 arrived at Bowdoin to play a show on April 5, 1991, few knew that the cult dream-pop band was falling apart.

“The notes rang out in cold clarity over the action, condensing themselves into a polar vista, beautiful for all their austerity and absence,” wrote Dan Pearson ’94 in a 2003 issue of the music magazine Stop Smiling. “Hearing it live, you were struck by this sense of space and the power of a single chord or word to ring and dopple out of sight.”

Months before, Pearson and his friend Christopher Heuer ’94 had booked the band to play in Moulton Union’s Main Lounge through the College’s Student Union Committee. In the tradition of college radio DJs eager to engage with underground artists but operating with limited budgets, they booked the band “on a shoestring,” according to Pearson. Last week I spoke with Pearson, who now lives in Connecticut and is working on a novel.

“It meant a lot for us to basically bring these things to Maine,” Pearson said. “Most of these bands that came up had never been north of Boston.”

Galaxie 500 had played the night before in Boston University’s hockey arena, warming up the crowd for the band’s better-known peers, the Cocteau Twins. After a transcontinental tour, Bowdoin was Galaxie 500’s last scheduled date before the band moved on to Japan.

But singer and guitarist Dean Wareham had other plans. Tensions had been building for weeks between him and the other two members of the band, drummer Damon Krukowski and bassist Naomi Yang, as they decided whether to sign to a major label following the success of their third album, “This Is Our Music.”

It was a time of transition for a whole generation of bands like Galaxie 500. Nirvana’s “Nevermind,” which signified the arrival of alternative rock on a mainstream stage, was released five months after the show at Bowdoin. 

Sonic Youth, who had been a well-established underground group in the 1980s, released their first album with the major label Geffen in 1990. Their tour the following year was immortalized in a documentary called “1991: The Year Punk Broke.”

Galaxie 500 would never make it to Japan. When the band arrived in Brunswick, a fed-up Wareham had been planning on quitting for weeks, setting the stage for Bowdoin to become an accidental landmark in alt-rock history.

“We were scheduled to go on at nine that night, but the opening band played for an hour and a half while we waited in the green room that the students had set up for us,” Wareham would later write in his 2008 memoir, “Black Postcards.”

“Being a college band, they didn’t know that the opener is supposed to play a short set and then get off the stage. We sat in the green room getting more and more irritated. And that was our final show—an annoying evening at Bowdoin College,” he continued.

Even with the internal tension, the band, with its deceptively simple chord progressions and quietly building percussion, impressed the student crowd of a few dozen that filled Moulton Union.

“It was a truly awesome show,” Pearson said. “The acoustics were awful, but it was the coolest place to have a show. 

Still, for Pearson and his peers, it was hard to square the musical excitement with the band’s apparent lack of interest in the school’s scene.

“[Dean] got so finished, he packed up and went out the door and drove away. I don’t even think he said thank you,” Pearson said. “We bought all this beer, and we wanted to have some beer and talk with them, but they just wanted to get back to Boston.”

The next morning, Krukowski called Wareham, still unaware that he intended to leave the band.

“Damon called Dean to say he was going to buy our plane tickets to Japan for the tour we had booked there, and Dean said he quit. Damon asked why and Dean said he had nothing more to say to us,” Yang recalled in a 2010 interview with Pitchfork.com.

Pearson didn’t hear about the band’s breakup until weeks later, when a tearful writer from CMJ (a music events company) called WBOR’s station manager with the news.

“It was a strange thing, because we were so excited and they were in a very different place with their relationships,” he said. “We really felt bad for a few years after, before the published accounts came out, and we thought it somehow had something to do with us.”

Galaxie 500’s records went on to become an important piece of the indie rock canon, but they remain as a tantalizing reminder of what could have been, as many of their contemporaries crossed over to commercial success while still retaining artistic control. 

The former members seem to agree that a deal with Columbia Records was imminent, had the band stayed together. Instead, the band was finished, along with the underground era it had matured in.

According to Pearson, students booking shows at Bowdoin felt the effects. All of a sudden, he said, “You weren’t talking to some dude in his apartment in Chicago. You were talking to major labels.”

“There were some very good shows, but by the time we were seniors we had really stopped trying to bring these little shows to campus,” he added. “They were putting more money into bigger acts.”

At Bowdoin, the concert itself seems largely forgotten. I did a double take when I came across a poster advertising the show on a music blog this summer. Of the Galaxie 500 fans I’ve spoken to at Bowdoin, none had heard that the band’s last show happened here.

Still, the ethos that brought the band to Bowdoin in the first place lives on. In spring 2013, The Antlers—a band whose atmospheric, melancholy guitar pop makes them a sort of spiritual heir to Galaxie 500—played WBOR’s spring concert in Smith Union before a similarly enraptured crowd.

Last spring brought an equally successful show from underground rapper Murs. While the members of Galaxie 500 seem unlikely to reunite—Wareham has a solo career, while the other two members perform as Damon & Naomi—independent music has once again found a home at Bowdoin. 

The Board of Trustees and Bowdoin Student Government (BSG) are making progress on finding a replacement for President Barry Mills, and have already interviewed some executive search firms and selected the two students who will sit on the search committee.

The Board is currently vetting the firms that will provide the committee with a variety of interested outside candidates, according to Vice President for Development and Alumni Relations Elizabeth Orlic.

“Search firms are being interviewed and considered, but to date, there has been no decision about this aspect of the search,” she wrote in an email to the Orient.  

The Board is expected to announce the names of the two students, along with the full membership of the committee, during its meetings next week. Jes Staley ’79 was announced as the chair of the selection committee on April 21, but he declined to comment for this article.The two student representatives were chosen by a committee composed of BSG executives from both this year and next year; terms for this year’s executives officially ended on Wednesday. Interviews for the committee were conducted earlier this week.

“We were completely blown away by the quality of students who applied to the position,” said Sarah Nelson ’14, president of BSG. “That was really inspiring for us as a committee, and it made our decision really difficult.” 

About 40 students from the Classes of 2015 and 2016 applied, according to Nelson. “The goal is to find two students with different backgrounds, who have different involvement on campus, who are part of different organizations, who have seen different parts of how the school works, and who really bring two unique voices to the committee,” Nelson said. 

The exact makeup of the committee remains to be seen. In an email to students on April 14, Chair of the Board of Trustees Deborah Barker wrote that the committee would include “members of the Board, faculty, students, staff, and other alumni representatives.”

George Lincoln Skolfield Jr. Professor of German Steven Cerf, who is retiring at the end of this year, served on the last presidential search committee to replace Bob Edwards, along with Professor of Physics Madeline Msall and Professor of Economics Deborah DeGraff.

At that time, three faculty representatives were elected. Cerf said the faculty worked to ensure that the three major ranks of faculty (assistant professor, associate professor and full professor) and the three major academic divisions (natural sciences, social sciences and humanities) were all represented. 

“I think it’s a once in a lifetime experience,” said Cerf. “There was a loyalty to the institution that meant that this committee sacrificed weekends and travel, poring over folders and interviewing candidates.”

Cerf said that the executive search company used by the last committee helped to narrow the field. 

“We were not beholden to them to hire only from their picks, but at least they gave us a sampling of people who would be eager to do such a position, who had experience in governance of a college and who manifested success,” he said. 

Mills originally chaired that committee. Cerf said that he “certainly wasn’t on [the committee’s] list.” 

“We were so impressed by his leadership on the committee that we asked him to resign so we could consider him as the future Bowdoin president,” Cerf said. 

As the new committee prepares to vet what will likely be a wide-ranging group of candidates, there are many questions to consider. Cerf said that a point of contention in the last search was academic experience. Having made his career as a corporate lawyer, Mills was not the most obvious candidate for a college presidency, but Cerf said that Mills’ Ph.D. and teaching experience in biology made a difference. 

“Our union card is a Ph.D.,” he said. “I heard from dozens of my faculty colleagues that they didn’t care what background this president had, they must have a Ph.D.” 

President Barry Mills announced on Monday that he plans to step down at the end of the 2014-2015 academic year. Mills has been president since 2001. 

“Transitions are inevitable, and after what will be 14 tremendous years as president, I believe it is time for me to make way for new leadership to propel Bowdoin into its next period of greatness,” Mills wrote in an email to campus.

In an interview with the Orient, Mills said that he came to the decision in March. He notified the Board of Trustees of his decision on Monday morning, followed by an email to the campus. 

In 2011, Mills told the Orient that he would stay at the College for at least five more years, making his departure in 2015 a year earlier than expected.

Mills graduated from Bowdoin in 1972 with a double major in Government and Biochemistry. He holds a Ph.D in Biology from Syracuse University and a J.D. from Columbia University School of Law. He was a partner at the New York-based law firm Debevoise & Plimpton LLP before assuming his position at Bowdoin. 

He has been popular among students, with approval ratings in Orient surveys consistently above 90 percent. 

“Barry’s been a really remarkable leader for this place,” said Dean of Student Affairs Tim Foster. “I don’t think I know anyone who has such passion for Bowdoin. You take his strategic mind and his relentless drive and his high aspirations for this place, and it’s quite extraordinary to see what’s been accomplished.”

Mills has also proven an effective fundraiser, helping to grow the endowment from $433.2 million in his first year in office to $1.03 billion in 2013. The amout of money the College puts toward  financial aid has more than doubled during his tenure—from $14.6 million (unadjusted for inflation) in 2001 to $32.3 million in 2013.

Mills is currently the second longest serving president in the NESCAC. Colby’s William D. Adams has been in office since 2000, but plans to retire at the end of this year. Mills’ tenure is the longest for a Bowdoin president since James Coles, who was in office from 1952 to 1967. Overall, Mills’s length of tenure will rank sixth-longest of 14 Bowdoin presidents.

Few members of the Bowdoin community knew of Mills’ plans before Monday. 

“Everyone knew this day would come, but it was a surprise,” said Foster. 

Senior Vice President for Finance and Administration and Treasurer Katy Longley said she “was hoping it wouldn’t be this soon.”

Mills said the timing of his announcement was meant to give the Board of Trustees enough time to start thinking about the transition in time for its annual meeting in May. The Board now has 14 months to find a successor and prepare for the transition.

Chair of the Board of Trustees Deborah Barker said that the committee is going to revisit Bowdoin’s mission, and think about where the College is currently headed, and then draft a job opening based on these considerations.

“A president needs to be everything,” she said. “He needs to be a chief executive—or she does—a politician, a leader and a fundraiser.”

Barker said that the Trustees hope to approve a search committee at their meeting on May 7 and 8.

“That’s the most important responsibility the Trustees have,” Foster said. “We have a stellar board, and they’ll get it right.”

Bowdoin Student Government (BSG) President Sarah Nelson ’14 sent an email to rising juniors and seniors Wednesday night inviting them to apply to represent the student body on the search committee. According to Barker, the board has reached out to all constituent groups—students, faculty, and alumni—to find potential committee members.

Mills said he does not plan on being involved in the search process.

“It’s not wise for a person to be involved in choosing their successor, so it will be up to that committee and the trustees to find a new president,” he said.

He cited the College’s stability as the main reason for his decision to depart a year earlier than he had planned.

“It’s not a lot earlier,” he said. “I recognize I’ve been here a long time. Fourteen years is a long time to be a college president, and the transition is going to be somewhat challenging for the school. My own view is that it’s important to allow a place to go through a challenging point when it’s in an incredibly good position.”

Mills also emphasized the importance of a president’s commitment to a long tenure.“It’s an incredibly good time for the College,” he said. “It deserves a new leader who is going to have a run rate of 10 to 15 years.”

For now, Mills said he is focusing on his remaining time at Bowdoin.

“Lots of people have asked me to reflect on the past, and I’m actually not interested in reflecting on the past right now. I’m interested in thinking about the future,” he said.  

He listed fundraising for the College’s financial aid endowment, supporting the Digital and Computational Studies program, and promoting the Coastal Studies Center as top priorities for his remaining time at Bowdoin.

As for his plans after Bowdoin, Mills said that his decision to step down should not be interpreted as a retirement—though he does not plan to practice law again.

 “I don’t want to retire,” he said. “I have a lot more years ahead of me where I think I can be incredibly effective and energetic and successful. And so I’m open to all kinds of opportunities.”

President Mills’ Monday morning announcement  came relatively abruptly, but it was a coordinated effort. Vice President for Communications and Public Affairs Scott Hood said he learned of Mills’ plans in a “number of conversations over the weekend.”

“The first order of business once he had made his decision was to tell his bosses—the Board of Trustees,” said Hood. 

After informing senior staff members of the decision individually, Mills placed a conference call to the trustees at 11 a.m.

An email announcement to staff, students and faculty came half an hour later, followed by an email from Debbie Barker ’80, chair of the Board of Trustees. Hood said that both of those emails were written over the weekend, and were not edited by the Office of Communications and Public Affairs beyond simple copy-editing.

After Mills’ email, Hood said, his office “took over with getting the word out.” The Bowdoin Daily Sun quickly posted online and promoted it on the College’s social media channels. The article was also sent in an email to alumni, parents, and the widows of alumni.

“The biggest challenge is making sure that things happen fast enough, so that you’re not leaving people out, so that they’re not hearing it in ways other than what we would prefer, which is from the College,” said Hood. “It was all done in 40 minutes.”

“Bowdoin students are very technologically savvy,” he added. “We knew that as soon as that email went out, it’d be out on Twitter. And it was.”

Mills himself was also involved in the social media blitz, posting a photo taken during the conference call to his personal Instagram account after the call ended.

“This was all Barry,” Hood said. “We’re sitting there, the phone call’s going on, and he hands his phone to one of the senior officers and says, ‘Take a picture!’”

Twelve students were disciplined before Spring Break for misusing the prescription drug Adderall, according to a source within the administration. Two of these students, both first years, were cited in last week’s Security Report for trafficking prescription drugs. 

Both of these students declined to comment to the Orient.

Dean of Student Affairs Tim Foster declined to comment on the disciplinary situations of individual students. According to the Student Handbook, students involved in drug trafficking have the option of “resigning” from the College or having a hearing in front of the Judicial Board (J-Board) for permanent dismissal. 

Two other implicated students agreed to talk to the Orient on the condition of anonymity; their names have been changed in this article to protect their identities. 

Abby, a female sophomore, said that she was approached by a friend looking to sell the drug.  “I directed her towards people who I knew wanted it,” she said. “We bought twice, and I wouldn’t say it was that much, but after the second time I sort of realized that it really wasn’t smart.”

“One of my best friends knew the first year and she got [the pills] from her and then gave some to me,” said Elizabeth, another female sophomore, in an email to the Orient. “I didn’t know that the main dealer was selling to a large amount of people,” she wrote. “I only knew that she had sold to a couple of my friends.”

Both said that a letter was sent to their parents, but they were not subjected to any other disciplinary action. 

“When I met with Security, I think they were really just most concerned with stopping whatever relationships had been made,” said Abby. “They really weren’t concerned with consequences or punishments—they didn’t even bring it up until I asked.”

According to Director fo Safety and Security Randy Nichols, the College makes a distinction between “furnishing” other students with drugs and “trafficking” them. The distinction, Foster said, is rooted in intent to make a profit. 

“There’s no place at Bowdoin for dealing drugs,” Foster said. “People need to know that, because if they choose to do that, to run a business, so to speak, then Bowdoin doesn’t want them here. And that’s where they’re given the option to say, okay, I’m gonna resign, or I’m going to go before the J-Board for permanent dismissal.”

Foster said that students can resign for a variety of reasons, but that the reason is not indicated on a transcript. 

“The transcript doesn’t say resigned, the transcript doesn’t say dismissed, the transcript doesn’t say medical leave of absence,” he said. “Bowdoin doesn’t do that. Other schools will do that, we won’t.”

The news of the bust has reignited conversation about the prevalence of Adderall and other prescription drugs on campus. 

“I think that the majority of students here have used Adderral [sic] to study at least once in their Bowdoin career,” wrote Elizabeth. “A lot of people with prescriptions willingly give some of their pills to their friends when they need them, sometimes asking for money in return.”

“I feel like who dabbles in drugs here really divides social groups, which I didn’t anticipate coming in,” said Abby. 

Foster had a different assessment. 

“I think there’s been a perception on campus that this is rampant, but when we’ve actually had students take the time to respond to anonymous surveys, we haven’t found that what the actual misuse is is as high as the perceived use,” he said. 

Foster cited a NESCAC-wide survey from Spring 2012 where five percent of Bowdoin’s respondents reported using prescription drugs like Adderall without a prescription over the past 30 days, and another two percent reported abusing prescription drugs they had legitimately. 

Meanwhile, over 10 percent of the respondents in a survey conducted last year by the Orient reported using Adderall or Ritalin recreationally or as a “study drug” on campus at least once. Regardless, Nichols said, “In a given year we’re not investigating a lot of cases of misuse of prescription drugs. We’ll have a handful.” 

Citing preliminary statistics from the federaly mandated Anual Clery Campus Crime Report, Nichols said that Security dealt 51 drug law violations in 2012, a 50 percent increase from 2012, when there were 34. Nichols said that most of these violations involved small amounts of marijuana.  

Both Abby and Elizabeth said they used Adderall primarily to study. 

“I know of others snorting it at night, but I rarely did that,” said Elizabeth. 

“Considering the drug’s general popularity and consumption on college campuses around America, I think that [its] illegality and immorality are being more and more overlooked by students,” said Elizabeth. “These pills have become sort of a norm, which is why I never really considered the repercussions of buying them.”

“I think that no one who was involved had any sort of real intentions,” added Abby. “I just don’t think anyone really thought about the consequences. The whole thing was just pretty naïve and stupid.”

As the price of the renovation of the former McLellan Building continues to rise, Bowdoin has committed an additional $20,000 to its annual payment to Brunswick for 2014. 

The Town of Brunswick intends to use the building as a new city hall once it is renovated. The town has seen the price of renovations on the building, originally estimated at around $100,000, grow to over $1 million. 

A February 6 article in the Times Record reported that new costs had put the renovation $20,000 over its most recent projected budget.

Brunswick acquired the building—located at 85 Union Street—from Bowdoin in December 2011 in exchange for the Longfellow Elementary School building, which has since become the Robert H. and Blythe Bickel Edwards Center for Art and Dance.

The College moved most of its offices from the building at the end of 2013. The Office of Communications and Interactive Media Group moved to the third floor, where they will stay for the next ten years as part of an agreement with the town. 

Senior Vice President for Finance and Administration and Treasurer Katy Longley said that the town requested the additional money this year to go towards a power generator in the building. 

“The generator’s going to cost $80,000, and we thought it was good because the communications office is on the third floor, and in the event of a power outage or a campus emergency it would be good to have backup power farther away from campus,” she said.

Since 2000, the College has made yearly payments on the building to the town instead of a standard property tax. 

“When we built McLellan as a way to support the Town of Brunswick, we did agree to pay some taxes on the building even though legally we weren’t required to,” said Longley, adding that the College had payed $555,916 in payments in lieu of taxes since it acquired the building in 2000.Generally, the College is exempt as a nonprofit from paying property taxes. However, Longley said there are certain types of property, like vacant property or faculty housing, where it does pay taxes. According to an economic impact report released by the College last year, it paid $253,967 in property taxes in the 2012 to 2013 fiscal year. Bowdoin also makes voluntary contributions to Brunswick and Harpswell, where the Coastal Studies Center is located. 

Longley said these grants are intended to offset the cost of fire and police responses that are related to the College. 

According to the College’s 2011 Tax Form 990—the most recent available—Brunswick received $123,000, while Harpswell received $8,800 in unrestricted contributions from the College. United Way of Mid Coast Maine, Pine Grove Cemetery, and Coastal Transportation received $15,000, $9,700, and $10,000, respectively. The Brunswick Downtown Association received $10,000. 

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is bringing changes to insurance plans across the country, and Bowdoin’s is no exception. Students on the College’s health care plan could see increases of up to 16 percent in their premiums next year.

To comply with the new law, the College’s health insurance will provide dental and vision care for students under 19 for the first time next year. The plan has also gradually been phasing out coverage limits for individual conditions, and next year all such limits will be eliminated.

The likely increases in premiums will be a result of these expansions, as well as new taxes and fees starting next year. Those taxes are expected to raise rates anywhere from 2 percent to 6 percent. This year, the premium for the College’s plan $1,544.

Students using the library for research will soon notice a change in one of its main tools. A new version of CBBcat, the joint online catalogue for the Bowdoin, Bates and Colby libraries, went live yesterday. 

New features include the ability to request a loan from Colby or Bates from within the catalogue, fewer duplicate results in searches, and the ability to search only for currently available materials.

The original version of CBBcat was launched in 2009, and although libraries from the three schools have shared resources since the 1970s, each school maintained its local systems and servers. 

Bowdoin announced plans this week to conduct a review of the way the student Health Center is structured. 

In an email to students and employees on Monday, Dean of Student Affairs Tim Foster wrote that the College is exploring the idea of outsourcing certain tasks to outside partners in light of the departure of Director of Health Services Sandra Hayes and the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. 

“Are there ways to provide students with greater access to medical specialists and improve the coordination of care between on- and off-campus providers?” Foster wrote. “Are there new ways to manage medical records or to make emergency services more readily available? What changes might we make to the Student Health Insurance Program in light of the Affordable Care Act?”

As Bowdoin prepares to move its offices from the first and second floor of the McLellan Building by Hannaford to various locations on campus, the Town of Brunswick is debating how to pay for the building’s higher-than-expected renovation costs.

At a meeting last Thursday, the Brunswick Town Council discussed possibilities for financing the renovation of the building, located at 85 Union St., which they estimate will cost nearly $1 million. The town plans to use the building as a new town hall.

“A lot of this discussion has arisen because the price has escalated,” said town councilor Benet Pols. 

This year’s Leadership Development Series, a program run by the Student Activities Office and the Bowdoin Student Government, launched with a a strong start as enrollment increased from last year. 

The program, which has run intermittently for the past few years, brings speakers from members of the Bowdoin campus and the wider community to talk to students on Fridays about practical leadership skills. 

Several changes have been made that Nathan Hintze, associate director of student activities, hopes will make the program more accessible. Last year, interested students had to commit to attending a full-year schedule of ten speakers. 

Dropped calls in places like Thorne and West Halls may soon be a thing of the past. The Information Technology Advisory Council (ITAC) is in the process of completing a project that will bring Verizon microcells to spots with weak mobile reception around campus.

This was one of several projects detailed in an email to students from ITAC, a student group dedicated to addressing concerns about technology on campus, on Tuesday. The council’s recent work also includes a new mobile printing app, PolarPrint, and EchoDrive, a Bowdoin-only cloud storage system reminiscent of larger systems like Dropbox. 

ITAC had been working to improve Verizon’s coverage on campus off-and-on for the past eight years, but struggled to get through the company’s bureaucracy, said Matt Glatt ’14, ITAC’s co-chairman and founder.