The Bowdoin Orient

A panel on Wednesday evening contemplated the meaning of the common good at Bowdoin, and the existence of the philosophy as a means to easy self-gratification versus a legitimate way to give back. 

The panel, held at Howell House, included President Clayton Rose, Director of the Joseph McKeen Center for the Common Good Sarah Seames, McKeen Fellow Marina Affo ’17, Director of Religious and Spiritual Life Bob Ives and Assistant Professor of Education Alison Miller. 

“I think it’s important [to have conversations like this] because Bowdoin definitely uses the common good as a way to advertise the school to the world,” said Kay Torrey ’19, a McKeen fellow who helped organize the panel. 

Torrey said that, despite her work at the McKeen Center, she and other McKeen fellows felt that they did not have a clear understanding of what the common good is. 

Seames described the common good as a two-part conceptual framework of discussing the common good and then putting it into action. Rose said he found the common good to be more of a journey rather than a specific set of actions and emphasized the importance of sincere work. 

“If we don’t engage in the work that we do with respect to the common good with a pure heart, is it really for the common good?” he said.

Ives defined the common good through the lens of religion and spirituality. He hypothesized that Joseph McKeen brought the idea of the common good to the College from religious texts.

The panelists were asked to respond to a wide variety of queries and comments, including how they would respond to “someone who tells you that Bowdoin uses the common good as a means of easy self-gratification rather than to selflessly give back.”

“I am really interested in thinking about—instead of students being selfless about what they do—thinking about their work in terms of reciprocity,” said Seames.

She added that thinking about reciprocity also means students must contemplate their own privilege.

“If you think you’re being altruistic … you’re still thinking of yourself as having something that someone else doesn’t,” she said.

The moderators also asked panelists where they see the common good at Bowdoin.

Miller said that she sees the common good in what Bowdoin students choose to do outside of the College. 

“When I see our teachers who are out in communities … choosing to go and teach in underserved communities and really take a difficult path beyond Bowdoin,” she said.

Oratile Monkhei ’20, who attended the panel, questioned how the common good manifests at Bowdoin outside of the McKeen Center.

“Beyond just saying we have, for example, the McKeen Center, and that’s the area for the common good, how does that same conviction of integrity play out in other departments?” she said.

Students said they found the discussion interesting but wished more students had attended.

“The panel was very transparent in their feelings and sentiments,” said Monkhei.  “I just wish or desire that more people had come to hear it … [I] started questioning as to who self-selects to come to such talks.” 

Despite having a small crowd, those who did attend said the panel was informative and engaging.

“I thought that it was an incredibly interesting and incredibly relevant topic,” said Sara Caplan ’20. 

Daniel Eloy ’15 returned to campus on Wednesday evening to exhibit a towering display of red, white and gold paper flowers highlighting racial violence in America. Eloy’s installation is the first event of No Hate November.

Sponsored by the Bowdoin Student Government (BSG) and held in the the Lamarche Gallery of David Saul Smith Union, Eloy’s installation, titled “The Garden of White Imagination,” is a collection of 374 flowers folded from paper, each flower symbolizing a person killed by police in 2016. The red flowers symbolize unarmed individuals of color, while the golden flowers represent children of any race.

“Each flower is constructed and its bloom comes forth because of someone being killed,” said Eloy. 

Each flower is constructed from eight pieces of paper. Eloy folded nearly 3,000 total papers for the exhibition.

“It took a really long time,” he said. “It felt like a necessary reflection on what [is] going on.” 

BSG first began No Hate November programming four years ago as a means for the community to stand in solidarity with students who experience bias on and off campus. Throughout the month, the programs focus on engaging students in dialogue and conversation, using different platforms to discuss contemporary issues like police brutality. 

“Something that really mattered to me is that we had some sort of creative piece of art because I think art can be such a powerful way of moving towards justice, and … bringing people together,” said current BSG President Harriet Fisher ’17, who helped coordinate the exhibit. 

Eloy emphasized that the focus of the exhibit was justice. 

“This isn’t about hating police,” Eloy said. “If you’re a police officer, I would hope that we would think that you can handle situations that are going to be unpleasant. That’s the whole point of having them. If anybody can have a gun and police their own community this would happen, and yet it’s still happening, and we have a force that’s dedicated to learning about their communities, or should be, [but] they aren’t, and that is abusive.”

Eloy created the art to engage with the Bowdoin community about the current issues regarding police violence and people of color. Fisher noted that bringing the installation to Bowdoin was a “powerful way of moving towards justice and … bringing people together.” 

“I think Bowdoin has a lot of white kids who are very privileged, who haven’t had to feel uncomfortable about a lot of things before … [Through] a piece of art maybe they’ll feel just the right amount of uncomfortable to start doing some research on educating themselves about why people are being killed on the street by police,” Eloy said.

Fisher believes Bowdoin has been heading in the right direction in taking initiative to make this community more aware of contemporary issues, although the College still has work to do. 

“It’s a space that’s much more willing to have a conversation than it was when I was a freshman,” she said.

Last week, 14 members of Bowdoin Women in Computer Science (BWICS) attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Houston, Texas—an annual conference exclusively for female computer scientists. The trip, largely sponsored by alumni donations, is a key element of BWICS strategy to show Bowdoin women that they, too, belong in computer science.

“Before this conference I wasn’t planning on applying to any internships within the computer science field this summer,” said Sam Valdivia ’19, a first-time conference attendee. “Now because of going to this conference, I feel that I can actually do it.”

The conference also doubled as a career fair. Students submitted their resumes beforehand and interviewed with companies on site. Three Bowdoin attendees were offered full-time jobs at the fair, while two others received summer internship offers.

The conference featured notable female computer scientists from major companies such as Google, Twitter, Amazon and IBM. Students expressed their awe after being in the presence of so many accomplished women.

“I had no idea that there were going to be 15,000 women and over 300 companies all in this one building in Houston,” said Maddie Bustamante ’17, co-founder of BWICS. “It was very overwhelming, but also so empowering to be in this space with all these really intelligent women.”

Of 76 current juniors and seniors who have already declared to be Computer Science majors at Bowdoin, just 26 students—34 percent—are women. Bustamante co-founded BWICS during her sophomore year to support her female peers in computer science.

“[BWICS is] trying to pave a path for future students,” she said. “It’s going to be a much easier process.”Associate Professor of Computer Science Laura Toma recalled coming to Bowdoin to interview in 2003. When she delivered a computer science lecture, all the attendees were male.

Toma first attended the Grace Hopper conference with two Bowdoin students in 2009. She believes the conference helps encourage women to stay in computer science.

“A lot of peer institutions have been sending their students there for many years. And there’s research that shows [attending] helps enormously with retention,” Toma said.

Due to shortages of interest and funding, no Bowdoin women attended the conference again until last year, when 10 students went. This year, Toma accompanied 14 students. She hopes that Bowdoin students can continue to attend in the future.

“We are not sure what is going to happen next year. We hope we can keep it going because everyone said it was an amazing experience,” Toma said.

However, the Student Activities Funding Committee only provides enough funding for club leaders to attend conferences like Grace Hopper, according to Director of Student Activities Nate Hintze. This year, BWICS group members attended with the help of alumni donations and scholarships that they had received from the conference itself.

Bustamante expressed her hope that Career Planning or the computer science department could help future funding, so the group doesn’t have to rely on alumni. Toma echoed this sentiment.“Success of women depends a lot on community-building, on social [connections] and this conference manages to do all of this,” Toma said. “My dream is that we can do this every year.”