The Bowdoin Orient

When President Barry Mills departs from the College in July after 14 years, he will leave behind a legacy of increased access to Bowdoin and a more diverse student body, something he accomplished through a dramatic expansion of the College’s financial aid program.

During his first year as president in 2001, the College awarded $13,870,759 (adjusted for inflation) in need-based financial aid to 627 students, according to the College’s Common Data Set. This year, Bowdoin provided $29,739,519 in institutional aid to 803 students, meaning that at the end of Mills’ tenure, the College both offers a larger average grant and provides grants to more students. Mills said that those rising numbers reflect his longstanding belief that financial aid is essential to the future of the College. 

“It’s been at the heart and soul of my commitment to the College since the day I came,” said Mills.

Indeed, as early as his October 27, 2001 inaugural address, Mills had identified expanding access and supporting students with need as one of the biggest challenges Bowdoin faced.

“Our continued commitment to a strong financial aid program will ensure that students from rural Maine, and students from poor neighborhoods in New York City and Los Angeles, and even some not-so-wealthy students from Rhode Island will be able to come here to learn,” he said that day. 

Mills himself was once one of those not-so-wealthy students from Rhode Island. His father had not finished the 10th grade, yet with the help of financial aid, Mills matriculated at Bowdoin and graduated in 1972. As he sees it, expanding access to Bowdoin is an integral part of the College’s commitment to the common good. 

“If you want to think about the common good—the idea that you are creating opportunity for a student who wouldn’t have it otherwise is hugely important to me,” he said.

Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Scott Meiklejohn said that the College’s financial aid program has become one of its strongest selling points.

“I think his view of Bowdoin and what Bowdoin means as a college, why Bowdoin exists, is to provide opportunity, and so at the level of inspiration, that message is really important for us to be able to communicate,” he said.

Mills’ commitment to financial aid is not just a message for the Office of Admissions, however. It has a real impact on how Admissions operates.

“I’ve just been in northern California for a week, and there’s not one student I met there—including a group of students at a 100 percent first-generation school in East Palo Alto—there’s not one student I met where I have to express any reservation about their opportunity to come here, because Barry and others have ensured that we have the resources to hold the door open,” Meiklejohn said.

Mills has been able to oversee a dramatic expansion of financial aid largely because of his success as a fundraiser and the strong performances of Bowdoin’s endowment over the last decade.

“We were able to succeed partly because people recognized that what we were doing was important for the students, important for the future for the school,” Mills said, “and we were able to succeed because we were able to raise the money to do it and because the endowment grew.”

Mills said that donors came to recognize the importance of financial aid because it was a priority—something that he reminded them about repeatedly. He joked that he spoke about aid so often that he sounded “like a broken record.” Broken record or not, his was a tune that got stuck in donor’s heads.

“When I came I was told financial aid money is very hard to raise,” he said. “Interestingly I found financial aid money is the easiest money to raise, and in many cases I’ve had donors who we’ve asked to do other things who would have preferred to give money to financial aid.”

Fundraising successes allowed Mills to increase his goals for financial aid. When his presidency began, he spoke about the irresponsibility of abandoning the College’s need-blind admissions policy. Seven years later, he had a far more ambitious goal in mind: adopting a policy of meeting 100 percent of demonstrated need without loans.

Bowdoin announced its no-loans initiative in January 2008. At the time, it was one of the only colleges with an endowment of less than one billion dollars to commit to no loans. Mills had worked with members of the Board of Trustees to help them understand why it was the right choice for the College.

Meiklejohn said that Mills had led the push for the no-loans policy.

“At a time when the college had the resources to expand its financial aid support and to go no-loan and to throw even more energy and commitment to low-income, first-generation students, Barry was the right person to galvanize the community around that and push Bowdoin even further ahead,” he said.

The policy has made financial aid available to middle class families, many of whom struggle to afford college as its cost keeps rising. According to Meiklejohn, there are currently 433 students from households with incomes over $90,000 who receive financial aid—about half of all aid recipients. Mills said that there are families on the higher end of the economic spectrum—even those at the bottom of the one percent—who have difficulty paying for college and deserve support.

As the country went into a deep recession in late 2008, the expensive no-loans initiative was adding to the College’s financial stress, but Mills felt that it was a policy worth maintaining.

“I’m proud to say we maintained the no loans. We didn’t lay anybody off; everybody kept their jobs,” he said. “The College got through that period with a lot of shared sacrifice where faculty and staff agreed to freeze salaries for a couple of years in order to allows us to maintain our commitments both to our employees and to the students.”

The no-loans policy has helped the College become a more diverse place, not only in terms of its socioeconomic composition, but also in terms of its geographic and racial composition.

According to the College’s Common Data Set, there were 50 black students, 50 Hispanic students and 1,295 white students enrolled during the 2001-2002 academic year. This year, 229 students identify as Hispanic, 88 as black, 1,147 as white, and 117 as non-Hispanic members of two or more races.

The College has also drawn more and more students from outside of New England, a trend that started before Mills’ tenure but has accelerated in recent years.

“The goal always was to make the school look like America—that meant racial diversity; that meant economic diversity; that meant diversity of view—and we succeeded in doing that to a point,” Mills said. “There’s always more work to be done.”

Mills said that these forms of diversity are important to the College’s mission to prepare its students to be leaders. He and Meiklejohn both said that after graduating, students will have to navigate a world where people have different viewpoints and backgrounds, and that a diverse student body is excellent preparation for that world.

“Creating a community that is more cosmopolitan, more diverse in the broadest sense, was essential, I think, to the future of the College,” Mills said. “We recognized that in order to bring people from different parts of the United States to the College, including racial diversity, we needed to put more money behind financial aid.”

I applied to Bowdoin for two reasons: The College had accepted my best friend early decision, and the Office of Admissions had sent me a glossy brochure, inside of which was one photo in particular that appealed to the romantic idealism of my 17-year-old self.

The photo showed a group of Bowdoin boys, bundled in brightly colored winter jackets as they played pickup hockey on the Quad. Hubbard Hall, framed by a row of trees and bathed in the light of a winter sunset, loomed in the background. 

For me, the photo was—and remains—a more generous offer than William DeWitt Hyde’s “Offer of the College.” It offered me a myth of Bowdoin, the myth of a place where the past bled into the present, a place where I could participate in academic toil one day and tomfoolery the next, a place with a literary quality that I'll never be able to describe.

Daily life at the College can’t possibly live up to this myth. During a hectic day of quizzes, 100-page readings, club meetings, essays and internship applications, it’s impossible to remain conscious of everything that life at Bowdoin means. At the end of that sort of busy day, I trudge home across the Quad, my head down, already scheduling myself for a frantic tomorrow.

When I look back at Bowdoin, I won’t remember those days. I’ll remember my four years at Bowdoin for those rare moments when the myth overcame the mundane—those moments when I lived the myth.

I’ll remember a Saturday in January of my sophomore year when two friends and I set out to convert Reed House’s backyard into an ice rink. 

We ran garden hoses from Reed’s basement bathroom up the stairs, out a window, and across the yard. None of us had any rink-making experience (and we were all humanities majors), so we expected the process would only take a few minutes. We thought it would be as simple as spraying some water, watching it freeze, and grabbing some skates.

It quickly became clear that we wouldn’t be skating for hours, so we descended into the basement and ratcheted up the water pressure by turning on the hot water. The three of us spent the rest of the afternoon drinking beers, watching “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and intermittently checking on the glacial progress of the rink. Just before dinner, a towel-clad Reed resident burst into our room and informed us with polite anger that there was no hot water in our 28-person House. And when the hot water returned 36 hours later, the rink was still hardly more than a soggy lawn.

I’ll remember reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Blithedale Romance” in the very same Massachusetts Hall in which Hawthorne studied. I’ll remember poring through “Tales from Bowdoin,” a 1901 book described as “some gathered fragments and fancies of undergraduate life in the past and present told by Bowdoin men.” Lounging on the windowsill in the Shannon Room, I’d put the book down from time to time and looked out on the Quad, imagining the Bowdoin men of the 19th century mischievously sneaking toward the Chapel under the cover of darkness.

But most of all, I’ll remember late nights at the Orient House when, after 13 hours of work, we clustered around a computer and collaborated on the final and most important part of the production process: conjuring up a suitably clever name for the editorial. We would spend all night considering Bowdoin’s purpose and its policies, and it all culminated in this pre-dawn moment when every joke was hilarious and no suggestion was too terrible to consider.

At the end of those nights, I strolled across the Quad and stopped at its center to gaze up at Hubbard Hall, which often looked as if it had been superimposed in front of the stars. And in those brief moments, I knew full well that I was living the myth of Bowdoin.

Garrett Casey is a member of the Class of 2015 and a co-editor in chief of the Orient. 

President Barry Mills took a seat in the middle of Bowdoin Climate Action’s (BCA) sit-in for fossil fuel divestment last night and debated with protesters for over an hour, reiterating that the College has decided not to divest, explaining why it made that choice, and taking questions from about 25 assembled students.

BCA has been occupying the second floor of Hawthorne-Longfellow Hall, which houses Mills’ office, since Wednesday morning, pledging not to leave until the Board of Trustees commits to divestment. A handful of students have continued the sit-in overnight, sleeping outside Mills’ office last night and Wednesday night. 

Mills argued that divestment was a symbolic tactic that would damage the College’s finances without creating meaningful change.

“We don’t think that the trade is worth it because frankly—as you all admit on your signs—this is a tactic,” he said. “The result from the tactic is incredibly burdensome to the College.”

Matthew Goodrich ’15, an organizer of the sit-in, disputed Mills’ claim that divestment would be ineffective, pointing to the 1980s movement to divest from apartheid South Africa.

“In 1986 a bipartisan Congress overrode President Reagan’s veto of the anti-apartheid sanctions act because of the divestment movement,” he said. “It builds the political mandate for a carbon tax, and that’s why we’re doing it.”

“I hear it. We just don’t agree,” said Mills.

“Well, we don’t agree, and that’s why we’re here,” responded Goodrich. It was the first of several moments when Mills and the BCA protesters simply did not agree.

Mills also argued that in order to divest the roughly 1.5 percent of the endowment that is invested in fossil fuels, the College would have to stop giving its money to some of its highest-performing external fund managers.

“The tactic results in this College losing hundreds of millions of dollars and puts at risk all of the other things that we do for the common good,” he said.

Senior Vice President for Investments Paula Volent estimated in 2013 that divestment would cause the College to lose $100 million over a ten-year period.

Michael Butler ’17 asked if the College would still lose millions of dollars if it invested in fossil-free funds created by firms like Cambridge Associates. Mills said that it would, citing a study conducted by Cambridge Associates in 2013, which found that if Pomona College divested from fossil fuel companies, its endowment would grow by $485 million less over a ten-year period and would therefore generate $66 million less for Pomona to spend.

The protesters then argued that investments in fossil fuel companies undermined the College’s commitment to the common good.

“Is it appropriate for a university to invest in fossil fuels?” Goodrich asked Mills.

“Sure,” Mills responded after a short pause.

“Well, there’s where we disagree,” said Goodrich. “The point of divestment is to align Bowdoin values, right? We are the College for the common good. The College is something more than just a business model seeking profit at any cost. The College is a place of education and a place of values that has existed for a very long time, and Bowdoin is particular in that we have made it our mission to further the common good, and that role, I think, is being undermined by our investments in the fossil fuel industry.”

Several students noted that a number of other schools have committed to divestment in some form. The University of Maine recently announced its plan to divest, while Stanford and most recently Syracuse have pledged to end their direct investments in fossil fuel companies. Mills said that some of these schools’ announcements have been “cynical” and will have little to no actual impact.

“I don’t think it was real,” he said. “I don’t believe that any of those schools that divested, that said they will not directly hold fossil fuel stocks—I bet if you investigate those schools they don’t hold a nickel of stock of any company [directly].”

Bowdoin does not have any direct investments in fossil fuel companies, according to Mills.

Hugh Ratcliffe ’15, who said he was looking for the “middle ground,” suggested that Bowdoin announce that it will not directly invest in fossil fuels in the future, which would give the divestment movement more political clout without damaging the College’s endowment.

“I don’t believe in taking politically easy stands that don’t mean anything,” Mills told Ratcliffe.

Monique Lillis ’17 asked for more engagement from the College and said that BCA’s request for a working group involving students, faculty members and trustees was a reasonable one. Mills responded that the demand for a working group put the College in an unfair position, since it presupposed that the College would divest.

“If you just read the demand that you’ve created, that you sent to the Trustees, you didn’t write, let’s create a working group to discuss whether this is a good idea,” Mills said. “You wrote, we want a working group to work toward divestment. Since we don’t agree, you’re asking us to create a working group to do something which we don’t agree to.”

BCA said that it plans to continue its sit-in.

Approximately 25 students have begun Bowdoin Climate Action’s (BCA) sit-in for fossil fuel divestment this morning on the second floor of Hawthorne Longfellow Hall, which houses the offices of President Barry Mills and Dean for Academic Affairs Cristle Collins Judd.

BCA is staging the sit-in because it believes the Board of Trustees has not taken their calls for divestment seriously. Sit-in organizer Matthew Goodrich ’15 said that protesters, many of whom are skipping classes, will refuse to leave until the College engages with them about divestment, adding that BCA's current plan is continue the sit-in overnight.

Mills is currently out of town—something that BCA was not aware of until the Orient mentioned it in an interview with spokespeople Allyson Gross ’16 and Goodrich, who said that his absence from campus would not have affected their choice to sit in today.

Administrators continued to work inside their offices with their doors closed. None of them were willing to speak to the Orient.

The sit-in was quiet, with protesters doing homework or browsing the Internet on their laptops. Many students wore orange patches on their clothing—a national symbol for the divestment movement.

Protesters were careful not to interfere with administrators. At one point, Judd walked through the reception area, politely asking several students to let her by. A few minutes later she walked past again, and protest organizers called out for other students to step aside.

Goodrich said that BCA does not plan on chanting or singing, which he says would be disruptive for the administrators in the office.

“We want to let them do their work and they’ll let us do ours,” he said.

Gross said that protestors are prepared in the event that the Office of Safety and Security asks them to leave the building.

“We have plans for all different levels of contingencies. We’ve been planning for a while and are prepared for whatever comes,” she said.

Goodrich said that BCA has not yet determined what it will do if protesters face disciplinary action from the College. 

“We’ll have to see. I’d like to see what happens first before we say what we’ll do,” he said.

The sit in could violate the College's Social Code, which prohibits, “Disruption of the orderly processes of the College, involving obstruction of teaching, research, administration, disciplinary proceedings, or other College activities, including its public-service activities.”

BCA also published a letter endorsing the sit-in that was signed by 16 parents of current students and 38 alumni, including Director of Religious and Spiritual Life Bob Ives '69.

Head Coach Tim Gilbride thinks that men’s basketball has a solid chance of winning its first-ever NESCAC title this weekend at Trinity, but said that doing so will require the Polar Bears to continue playing their best basketball of the year.

“I think we have a real good shot,” said Gilbride. “Any of the four teams there for sure can win it. We have as good a chance as anyone.”

After its come-from-behind, 87-74 victory over Williams in last Saturday’s quarterfinal in Morrell Gymnasium, the team will take on Amherst in tomorrow’s semifinal. Amherst defeated Bowdoin 81-66 in late January, but the Polar Bears think they have become a different team—and in many ways a better team—since that loss.

When the Polar Bears last met Amherst, they had just lost senior captain Keegan Pieri to a season-ending injury and were adjusting to a new playing style. Captain Bryan Hurley ’15 said that the team has settled into that new style since that loss to Amherst.

“That was early on when we were getting used to not having [Pieri], and getting used to playing with a smaller team with a more up-tempo pace on offense, and getting used to defending with a smaller team,” said Hurley. “It’s starting to come along now, and we’re starting to play well together as a team.”

The team’s recent record supports Hurley’s claim. Since the Amherst loss, the Polar Bears have gone 5-1, with big wins over Middlebury and Bates. A large—and lanky—reason for that recent success is Lucas Hausman ’16, who became the first player in NESCAC men’s basketball history to win three straight Player of the Week awards after his 37-point performance against Williams last weekend.

Hurley said that Hausman will need to maintain his impressive form tomorrow against Amherst, and that the Polar Bears cannot allow the Lord Jeffs to get off to a strong start.“If they get off early to a good shooting start then they’re going to be a tough team to beat, but if you clamp down defensively they can start to implode,” said Hurley.

The Polar Bears were able to recover from a slow start of their own against Williams last Saturday. In the first half, Williams guard Hayden Rooke-Ley hit six three-pointers—many of them uncontested—to give the Ephs a seven-point lead. That lead could have been larger were it not for senior John Swords, who went a perfect 8-8 from the field during the first half, scoring 16 of his eventual 23 points.

Gilbride made some tactical adjustments during halftime, and the Polar Bears started the second half on an 8-0 run, turning a seven-point deficit into a one-point lead in less than two and a half minutes. Hurley said the team knew it could score against Williams, but that it made some changes on the other side of the ball.

“Defensively we made sure we got out on shooters, especially [Rooke-Ley],” said Hurley. “We let him get open way too much in the first half.”

The adjustment worked. The Polar Bears held Rooke-Ley to only seven second-half points, and zero points in the game’s final 14 minutes, meaning that the Williams senior finished his career with 999 points. The Ephs, who shot 52 percent from the field in the first half, hit only 28 percent of their shots in the second.

The offense also found its groove, led by Hausman who scored 25 of his 37 points in the second half on 7-9 shooting and six trips to the free-throw line. Hausman said that because of the game’s high stakes, the Polar Bears were motivated to come out aggressive after halftime.

“There was a general realization in the locker room that this could be the end of the season and I don’t think anybody wanted that,” he said. “And I don’t think there was anyone in our locker room who thought that Williams was a better team than us.”

The players are focused on this weekend’s NESCAC tournament, but the NCAA D-III Tournament is not far from their minds. Gilbride said that they are a bubble team at the moment, and while a NESCAC title would earn the Polar Bears an automatic bid, Hurley said that a win in tomorrow’s semifinal would likely be enough to secure them a spot.

For now, however, the Polar Bears have their sights set on a NESCAC title, and although they lost to all three of the other semifinalists—Amherst, Trinity and Wesleyan—during the regular season, Hausman said he remains confident.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that we can hang with or beat any of them,” Hausman said.

The dancers provide the code, and the computer scientists transform it into choreography. That’s the basic idea behind a collaborative project between Assistant Professor of Dance Charlotte Griffin’s Advanced Dance Composition class and Associate Professor of Computer Science Stephen Majercik’s course, Nature-Inspired Composition.

Dancers in Griffin’s class combined different movements, each assigned a number, to create performances that can be reduced to numeric sequences. These sequences constitute a code for the computer science (CS) students, who write “fitness functions” that determine which sequences are best (although the dancers bristled at the idea of one dance being objectively better than another). The function—through a process that Majercik compared to evolution—will spit out a new sequence of movements, a type of computer-generated choreography.

As often happens when two disciplines come together—especially disciplines as disparate as CS and dance—there have been some slight hiccups. Griffin said that the project has involved a departure from the typical language of dance.

“A lot of this language is very challenging from a choreographic standpoint, like picking the best, ranking in order of preferences,” said Griffin. “In choreography I’m not using words like good or bad. It’s more like interesting or contrasting or complementary.”

Majercik has had to adjust his vocabulary as well. He admitted that his dance experience is limited to social events like weddings and parties.

“I don’t think I’ll make this mistake again, but I made the mistake several times of saying we want something good,” Majercik said. “And [Griffin] says, ‘No, we don’t want something good. It doesn’t have to be good—it can be interesting.’”

Only a few minutes later, Majercik made the same mistake again while describing the challenge of building a fitness function to evaluate the dances.

“Here’s the crux of it. Here’s where the difficult piece is,” he said. “For the evolution to work there has to be a function that evaluates the sequence and gives it some sort of score—how good is it?”

“Or how interesting,” Griffin interrupted, prompting laughter from both professors.

Dancers in Griffin’s class also struggled to adapt to the language and logic of CS, particularly when students from Majercik’s class visited the studio to rank the dance sequences and develop criteria for their fitness functions.

“I don’t believe in ranking dances like that, especially among people that you’re in class with,” said Sarah Guilbault ’18. “It’s not a quantitative thing to rank dances, but it’s necessary for computer science in order to create new sequences.”

Lucy Saidenberg ’15 had similar reservations, but found that the project was still valuable.“It was a little scary at first, but I think the concept was really interesting in the end,” she said.

Both dancers and CS students underscored the potential awkwardness of interdisciplinary collaboration when they described the meeting between their classes. Simon Moushabeck ’16, who is in Majercik’s class, said that “it was like studying another species” and Saidenburg joked that it would be “hilarious” to see the CS students dance.

Griffin and Majercik may seem like an odd pair, given the enormous differences between CS and dance, but they share the belief that their respective fields can benefit from a carefully designed collaborative project.

“We’re working on theme and variation this semester, so this is an opportunity to look at movement analysis and movement variation in a way that a choreographer might not do on their own,” Griffin said.

Majercik said he was excited by the questions and uncertainties of the project.

“It’s been really interesting trying to figure out how these two processes can work together,” he said. “Can you think of it being a collaboration between a dancer and the algorithm? It’s really an exploration. We’re not sure where it’s going to lead.”

Griffin and Majercik began planning a collaborative effort two years ago, when they served on a working group as part of the College’s Digital and Computational Studies Initiative (DCSI). Their current project is not a formal part of the initiative, but they think of it as an experiment in what they call the “computational arts.”

The two professors see this semester’s project as a trial for a future course in which students would participate as both dancers and computer scientists. They would call that course Computational Expressivity.

Majercik said that a number of students in his class seem interested in such a course.

Moushabeck said that he has enjoyed applying CS principles to a real-world problem.

“I think it’s a cool idea,” he said. “It gives us the chance to put something that we’re learning to use, to see it make results in a way that’s not just seeing the numbers fly down on the screen.”

Not all the dancers were as sure about the idea, however.

“I don’t love the idea of a computer telling me which moves are the most aesthetically pleasing,” said Saidenburg. “I don’t really believe that it’s possible, just because of the subjective nature of what’s good dance.”

The United States Olympic Committee (USOC) selected Boston to compete globally to host the 2024 Olympic Games on January 8, accepting a proposal put forward by dozens of local businessmen and politicians. John Fish ’82, chairman and CEO of Suffolk Construction, is chair of Boston 2024, the group working to bring the Olympics to Boston.

The announcement has provoked a great deal of debate. Although the bid has the backing of dozens of powerful political leaders, including Mayor Marty Walsh, a group called No Boston Olympics has begun organizing against the proposal, and the community is wary of using public funds to finance the Olympics.

In a phone call with the Orient, Fish said that debate over the future of the region, and how the Olympics might fit into that future, is itself productive. He realized the significance of such a debate when the idea of a Boston Olympic Games was first brought to him a few years ago.

“At that point in time I was thinking was this real or not real, and the more I got into it the more I realized that there was a lot of opportunity, even just at the conversation level—whether or not we were going to host the Olympics,” he said. “Having the conversation about the potential, it created a lot of the opportunity to think about where we want to be in, say, 2030.”

Hosting the Olympics would require major upgrades to Boston’s transportation infrastructure and the development of a multi-billion dollar Olympic Village. Several op-ed writers, recently published in The Boston Globe, are excited about these possible upgrades, dreaming of a transit ring around the edges of the city or the potential of the proposed Olympic Boulevard to connect the harbor, the South End and South Boston. Fish said he is glad that all of these ideas are part of the Olympic conversation.

“How do we think about upgrading the rail system to Worcester? How do we think about high-speed rail to Springfield? How do we think about expediting the South Coast Rail all the way down to Fall River and beyond?” he said. “You think about those conversations—that has noting to do with the Olympics. But what it all has to do with is where we want to be in the future.”

Fish has recused his construction company from bidding on Olympics-related projects.“I don’t want people thinking that my pursuit of these Games has anything to do with any monetary improvements at my company or an improvement for me personally,” he said.

No Boston Olympics argues that the public and private investment required for hosting the Games would be better spent in areas like education or health care. It also cautions that Massachusetts’ taxpayers would be on the hook for any costs that exceed the budget. There are already question marks in the initial budget, which includes $3.4 billion of funds that will come from unspecified “public/private partnerships.”

“Unfortunately the connotation with the Olympics is financial risk—high financial risk—and I think that comes as a backdrop of Sochi and Montreal and other Olympic Games,” said Fish about citizens’ budget concerns.

Fish noted that the last four Olympic Games hosted on U.S. soil were cash flow positive, and that the 2002 Winter Games positively transformed Salt Lake City. However, he said he is happy to hear dissenting opinions.

“Listening to their opinions and their ideas and their concerns is what the democratic process is all about,” Fish said. “That is the opportunity for us to learn, to listen, to respond.”

Not everyone agrees that Boston 2024’s process has been democratic, however. Joan Vennochi expressed concern in her January 22 Globe column that Fish could set Massachusetts’ agenda for the next decade or more without having ever won elected office.

Former gubernatorial candidate Evan Falchuk recently registered the People’s Vote Olympics Committee to promote a 2016 statewide ballot question about funding the Games, and other groups are considering putting questions on this fall’s municipal ballots in Boston and Cambridge. Boston City Councilor Josh Zakim proposed this week four non-binding Olympics-related ballot questions for his city’s ballot.

Fish did not say directly whether or not he supports a referendum. He said instead that Boston 2024 needs to continue telling its story and supporting it with facts.

If Boston wins the International Olympic Committee’s approval, there will be another set of questions to answer. One of them is who would light the torch at the opening ceremony, and almost a decade in advance, names are already swirling. Among them are Joan Benoit-Samuelson ’79, who won gold in the first ever women’s Olympic marathon in 1984. Benoit-Samuelson already has the support of one important individual.

“That’s the person I vote for,” Fish said. “I’m so proud to be a Polar Bear and nothing would make me more excited and proud than to watch Joan [Benoit-Samuelson] carry the Olympic torch into the Olympic Stadium.”

At the start of the second week of classes in the Spring 2015 semester, the Bowdoin community received one of the year’s most important announcements—that Bowdoin had found its next president.

After learning that Clayton S. Rose would replace President Barry Mills, many affiliated with the College tempered their excitement with a certain measure of skepticism. While Rose might not be a typical choice, having no experience in the liberal arts and no connection to Bowdoin, most concluded that it is too soon to say what kind of leader Rose will be. Optimism seems to be the collective sentiment.   

Many Bowdoin students and alumni took to social media after the announcement. Some posted congratulatory messages while others voiced disappointment with the choice. One of the recurring objections was the fact that Bowdoin will still have a white, male leader during a time when many peer schools are beginning to appoint female or non-white presidents. 

Several NESCAC schools have elected female presidents in the last five years: Amherst in 2011, Bates in 2012, Connecticut College in 2013, and Trinity and Middlebury in 2014. When Laurie Patton of Middlebury takes office this fall, six out of the 11 NESCAC schools will have female presidents, making male NESCAC presidents a minority. 

Jes Staley ’79, chair of Bowdoin’s search committee, said that the choices of peer schools did not pressure the committee to select a female or a person of color.

“We put together a list of candidates with Isaacson, Miller that was very diverse—that looked at some extraordinarily talented women, some extraordinarily talented candidates of color—so when we started to interview the candidates, it was a very diverse slate,” Staley said. “It would be great to make history, but we had to find the best person to run Bowdoin College—and that was Clayton [Rose].”

Associate Professor of Africana Studies and English Tess Chakkalakal, a member of the search committee, agreed with Staley.

“We kept the pool diverse throughout the process and after that point you can’t really be looking at race or gender as an actual qualification for the job. At least I don’t,” she said.

“Some people are frustrated that he is a straight, white male, but I think a lot of people also recognize that he has had a very successful career and has done very well for himself academically,” said Colin Swords ’15. “The qualifications that indicate that he’ll be an excellent fundraiser for our school and that he’ll be able to do good things for our financial aid—those count more to me than a symbolic gesture.”

Others questioned why Rose, who has never attended or taught at a small liberal arts institution, was chosen for the job. The last president without exposure to a small liberal arts environment was William DeWitt Hyde, the College’s seventh president who was in office from 1885-1917. 

The A. Myrick Freeman Professor of Social Sciences and the Chair of the Sociology and Anthropology Departments Susan Bell said that though Rose had not necessarily been part of a liberal arts community, he seems committed to Bowdoin’s spirit of intellectual pursuit. 

“What I find impressive is that he chose to get a Ph.D.,” said Bell. “It suggests that somebody cares deeply enough about education and the liberal ideals of education that he put himself into a position of student as an older person. It suggests that he really values something that we value in the academy, and that’s life-long learning. I don’t know if he would talk about it in this way, but as an outsider observing him, it tells me that not only does he care about life-long education and a self-cultivating approach to life but that he did the disciplined work you need to do in order to finish a Ph.D.” 

Rose left his career as a businessman working at J.P. Morgan to return to the University of Pennsylvania to get his doctorate in sociology. He wrote his dissertation, “Race at the top: Organizational response to institutional pressures and the racial composition of the corporate elite,” on the ways in which African Americans are included on corporate boards of directors.  

“I’m really excited that he has a background in sociology because I think this [background] will be really beneficial as he addresses particular issues that Bowdoin students are passionate about and interested in,” said Priscila Lafore ’14. 

Rose’s experience working at J.P. Morgan and teaching management practice has some in the community saying that he’s an especially qualified choice. 

“My understanding of the president’s job is that it primarily deals with management and finances, and it seems like this guy knows a lot about both of those subjects,” said James Jelin ’16.

—Cameron de Wet and Joe Sherlock contributed to this report.

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On Monday morning the Board of Trustees unanimously elected Clayton S. Rose the 15th president of the College, effective July 1. President-elect Rose, who is currently a professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School (HBS), accepted the position shortly after the vote.

Prior to his time at HBS, Rose worked in the financial services industry for 20 years, serving as vice chairman and chief operating officer at J.P. Morgan in 2001, when he decided to return to academia. He enrolled in a doctoral program in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in 2003, where he studied race in America and graduated with distinction in 2007. Rose’s other academic credentials include a B.A. and M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. He is originally from San Rafael, Calif.

The College held a brief ceremony at 3 p.m. on Monday in David Saul Smith Union to introduce Rose to the Bowdoin community. President Barry Mills, Chair of the Presidential Search Committee and member of the Board of Trustees Jes Staley ’79, Rose and his wife Julianne were in attendance. Several hundred students, faculty, staff and Brunswick residents filled Morrell Lounge and lined the ramps of Smith Union to hear Rose speak.Staley, representing the search committee, said that the body had tirelessly pursued the right candidate.

“We came from different backgrounds and ages,” said Staley. “The search committee clearly reflected the diversity of Bowdoin. The search committee worked incredibly hard. We pored over hundreds of résumés and discussed dozens of potential candidates.”

Staley said that the search committee is confident that Rose is the individual best-suited to guide Bowdoin into the future.

“The search committee was convinced that Clayton has thought deeply about the values of a liberal arts education and the challenges that lie ahead. He has the intellectual strength and quiet confidence to engage with our faculty as we consider the issues facing modern education—from technology to accessibility,” he said.

Rose’s candidacy came from Isaacson, Miller, the search firm Bowdoin hired to help find its new president, but Rose and Staley in fact worked together and became close friends at J.P. Morgan.

“I have learned much by listening to and watching Jes Staley, my long time business partner and great friend,” Rose wrote in the acknowledgments section of his dissertation. “He and I have been discussing issues of race and opportunity in the business world for many years, and he stands above any other executive that I know in his willingness to honestly address difficult social issues; he is a role model for other business leaders.”

A 2012 article in FT Magazine, the weekend insert in the Financial Times, tells the story of Staley giving Rose a Frodsham pocket watch—said to be one of John Pierpoint Morgan’s favorite gifts to give—when Rose left J.P. Morgan in 2001. According to the article, Rose returned the favor on the occasion of Staley’s 50th birthday in 2006.

“It sits on my desk at home and it’s been with me the whole time,” Rose said about the watch in an interview with the magazine. “I have a little stand for it and I look at it every night and every day. It’s a link to a firm and an ethos and a culture that was very much a part of me.”

Staley disclosed his relationship with Rose to the search committee, whose members said that it had no bearing on their selection.

“Apart from the fact that it was disclosed, it was not a big part of our deliberations nor did Jes do anything to make one suspicious of what was going on,” said Professor of Government Paul Franco, who sat on the search committee.

Seniors Oriana Farnham and Dusty Biron and Associate Professor of Africana Studies and English Tess Chakkalakal, all members of the committee, agreed with Franco’s assessment.

Rose began his first address to the Bowdoin community by acknowledging Mills’ accomplishments during his 14-year tenure. Resounding applause followed his words of recognition, demonstrating the esteem in which the Bowdoin community holds Mills.

Earlier in the afternoon during an interview with Orient, Rose explained the decision he made in 2001 to leave the world of finance and return to academia.

“In the business sphere you kind of think of things as a mile wide and an inch deep, and I wanted to flip that and see if I had the intellectual chops to be able to go a mile deep and an inch wide,” said Rose. “The issue that I wanted to go a mile deep into was the issue of race in America, so sociology was the natural academic platform to pursue that interest. I had never taken a sociology class in my life until I showed up at [UPenn] to begin the program—it’s quite a remarkable and powerful discipline actually as I discovered.”

William Bielby, currently a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was a professor of Rose’s at UPenn and is the collaborator of his dissertation. Bielby said that given Rose’s career as an executive and his research focus in sociology, he will be able to make progress on racial issues that goes beyond symbolism.

“He has some interesting insights, a good handle on those kinds of things about making sure that when you are being supportive of diversity efforts or giving directives in the area of diversity, that there is indeed appropriate accountability and oversight so that there really is meaningful change,” said Bielby.

Rose also spoke to the pressures faced by today’s liberal arts colleges. He acknowledged that the public is becoming increasingly conscious of the value of higher education in terms of dollars and cents, but said that there is still a need for the liberal arts.

“It is essential to helping us grow, to shaping us, to creating fulfilling lives, meaningful lives for each of us, and then there’s the value it brings to society more broadly, an engaged and informed citizenry,” Rose said.

He added that a liberal arts education does not disadvantage students as they enter the job market.

“I actually see no tension, no tradeoff between a very high quality liberal arts education that’s dedicated to the notion of the individual and society,” Rose said. “The skills and tools that you develop in liberal arts education—critical thinking and the ability to communicate and understand the world—are incredibly important to whatever vocation someone is going to have. Those are deeply meaningful and powerful skills.”

Chakkalakal said that an ability to articulate the value of the liberal arts was something she was looking for in each of the candidates, and that Rose clearly had it.

“I think what [Rose] is going to bring here is a way of thinking about the value of the liberal arts in a kind of figurative way and also a material, financial way—that there is a payoff to a liberal arts education,” she said.

Franco said he thought Rose possessed the managerial and financial skills that are essential to the job, but also that Rose understood academia from the inside and would be up to the challenge of grappling with Bowdoin’s curriculum.

“There hasn’t been a great deal done in terms of curriculum reform for many years, ever since the distribution requirements that are currently in place were put in place,” Franco said. “So we’re due for some sort of revisitation of what we teach and how we teach.”

In addition to the skills suggested by his résumé, Rose had another important, if less concrete, qualification.

“He has a Bowdoin-ness to him,” said Farnham.

—Cameron de Wet and Ron Cervantes contributed to this report.

Editors note: An earlier version of this article was published on Monday January 26 and has since been updated to reflect what ran in the January 30 print edition of the Orient.

Richard Morgan ’59, one of the College’s longest-serving and most beloved professors, died last night at the age of 77. Morgan, part of the faculty for 45 years, was married to Gary M. Pendy Sr. Professor of Social Sciences Jean Yarbrough.

Morgan not only occupied a distinguished position among the faculty, but he also inhabited the office at the pinnacle of Hubbard Hall’s gothic tower, a testament to his stature at the College and a cherished spot for students who attended his weekly office hours.

A man revered in the fields of constitutional and international law, Morgan started teaching at Bowdoin in 1969, 10 years after graduating from Bowdoin and subsequent to receiving an M.A. and Ph.D. in the Department of Public Law and Government at Columbia University and serving as a fellow in law and government at Harvard Law School.

“I would have had a lot of fun as a lawyer, but I wouldn’t have been able to spend my time on precisely those legal problems that interest me most,” Morgan said in a 2005 interview with the Orient. “In academic life, you trade income for freedom to concentrate on the things that really interest you.”

Morgan has written a number of books, among them “The Supreme Court and Religion,” “Domestic Intelligence: Monitoring Dissent in America” and “The Law and Politics of Civil Rights and Liberties.”

In addition to his significant academic credentials, Morgan was a first lieutenant in the Army Reserves from 1963-1964. He was also a registered Maine Guide who loved fishing on the Kennebec River near Jackman, Maine.

Morgan, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Constitutional Law, was teaching his Constitutional Law I course until October 16. Free speech cases were Morgan’s favorites to teach.

“Free speech problems tend to give us pure issues of democratic theory. If you think seriously about liberty, there is a fundamental contradiction at the base of the idea,” he told the Orient in 2005.

On a campus made up of predominantly liberal students, Morgan was often referred to as “the conservative professor.” When the Orient asked Morgan about this reputation in 2005, he responded in a typical cheeky manner.

“Yeah, I’m a right wing ideologue,” he said.

In addition to his wife, Morgan is survived by two stepsons, James Yarbrough Stern (Hilary) and John Francis Sutherlin Stern (Elisa), by three grandchildren, Henry, William, and Alexandra, and by his first wife, Eva Morgan of Brunswick.

The College is planning a service in the Bowdoin Chapel on Thursday, November 20th, at 11:00 a.m.

The Orient will run a full obituary of Professor Richard Morgan in its November 21 issue.

Field hockey defeated Colby and Tufts this week to finish the regular season atop the NESCAC standings and earn hosting rights for the upcoming conference tournament. The Polar Bears (9-1 NESCAC, 14-1 overall) eased past Colby 4-1 last Saturday in Waterville and rounded out their regular season Wednesday night with a 4-0 win at home against the Jumbos.

Hosting rights could prove important in the NESCAC tournament. Bowdoin and Middlebury have met in the last three NESCAC championship games, two of which went into overtime and the other saw a decisive goal scored with less than two minutes remaining. The home team emerged victorious in all three contests.

The Polar Bears, however, are focused on tomorrow’s quarterfinal against Hamilton (2-8 NESCAC, 6-9 overall), not a possible rematch with Middlebury in the championship.

“At the moment we’re just incredibly proud that we finished top of the NESCAC,” said Head Coach Nicky Pearson. “To be honest, currently that just gives us the right to two practices and one more game. We’re not looking any further forward then the next couple of practices and playing Hamilton on Saturday.”

Bowdoin took the lead five minutes into Wednesday night’s game against Tufts (6-4 NESCAC, 11-4 overall), when senior Colleen Finnerty took a shot from the top of the circle that Rachel Kennedy ’16 redirected into the net.

Kennedy struck again fifteen minutes later. Shortly after the Polar Bears failed to convert off a penalty corner, she latched on to a loose ball in front of goal and backhanded it between two Tufts defenders and past the diving goalie.

Kennedy notched a third goal with 10 minutes remaining in the first half, bringing the ball into the Jumbos’ circle and laying it off for Adrienne O’Donnell ’15 on the right side. O’Donnell took the ball to the end line and centered it for Kennedy, who tucked it into the left side of the net.

O’Donnell played in the midfield last year and developed a connection with Kennedy, but the two have had to recalibrate their partnership since O’Donnell began playing as a forward this year.

“This year more so it has to be a little ball, a very direct ball to her, and I think we both worked really hard to make that connection,” O’Donnell said. “A lot of times we can get the speed advantage on the right side, so I can get past my defender and shoot the ball.”

Kennedy has now scored 19 goals in her last six games.

Tufts opened the second half strong, winning several penalty corners and forcing Bowdoin back into its own half. O’Donnell said the Polar Bears knew not to underestimate the Jumbos .

“Tufts is always really good. They have really strong individual skills,” she said. “The whole game it didn’t feel like we were up 2-0, 3-0, 4-0. We were on edge the whole time.”

The Jumbos failed to capitalize on their opportunities, however, and it was the Polar Bears who scored the only goal of the second half. About seven minutes after play resumed, the Jumbo’s goalie made a number of saves before the ball rebounded out to Juliana Fiore ’18, who fired it home from the left side of the circle.

Fiore had led the charge offensively on Saturday against Colby (4-6 NESCAC, 9-6 overall), scoring twice for the Polar Bears. Kennedy scored a first half goal and O’Donnell capped off the 4-1 win with a late goal off a corner. 

“I usually get the ball and read what’s open based on what their fly comes out as,” O’Donnell said. “So I just took a shot. It tipped off their defender’s stick and went into the top of the net.”

O’Donnell said that the team is pleased it won the right to host the later rounds of the NESCAC tournament, but that its focus is on tomorrow’s quarterfinal against Hamilton. The Polar Bears beat the Continentals 6-0 on October 11.

“It’s by no means a shoo-in game,“ she said. “We’re certainly excited to host but we still have work to do.”

Pearson said that the Continentals have improved significantly since facing the Polar Bears earlier this month, and cannot be taken lightly.

“The danger is to look at that game and think it’s going to go exactly the same way the second time you play a team,” said Pearson. “But it never does.”

Tomorrow’s NESCAC quarterfinal against Hamilton will be played at noon on Howard F. Ryan field.

Maine’s Democratic nominee for governor and current congressman Mike Michaud delivered a brief speech and fielded questions from students in Helmreich House on October 5.

Michaud stuck to the stump speech he has delivered around the state, telling the story of his early political career—when he split time between the Great Northern Paper Mill in East Millinocket and the state legislature—and describing what he accomplished during a 12-year tenure representing Maine’s second district in Washington, D.C.

Recent polls have showed a tight three-way gubernatorial race between Michaud, Republican incumbent Paul LePage and Eliot Cutler, an independent. Two polls were published last week—one giving Michaud a 42-36 lead over LePage and another showing LePage winning 41-40. Cutler had the support of 16 percent of voters in each poll.

With polls showing Cutler in a distant third, Michaud focused his criticisms on LePage, citing the current governor’s “failed policies” as his reason for entering the governor’s race.“Our biggest liability as a state is our governor,” Michaud said.

Michaud highlighted some of his policy proposals, including investing in renewable energy, his Maine Made jobs plan, and expanding Maine’s Medicaid program under the Affordable Care Act.

Medicaid expansion is one of the issues that separates Michaud and LePage most clearly. In April, LePage vetoed a bill that would have expanded Medicaid to over 60,000 low-income Maine residents.

“The expansion offered through Obamacare would have a disastrous impact on Maine’s budget, as well as those truly needy individuals—our disabled and elderly—who rely today on the scarce resources in our program,” LePage wrote at the time.

Michaud told students at Helmreich that there is a “moral responsibility” to expand Maine’s Medicaid program. When one student pushed back, citing LePage’s concern that expansion would be too expensive, Michaud argued that it would actually save money by reducing the number of uninsured patients seeking uncompensated care in emergency rooms.

The federal government would cover 100 percent of the cost of Medicaid expansion through 2016, a figure that would decrease to 90 percent by 2022.

Michaud also addressed the closure of the Verso mill, which was announced on October 1. He said that the closure was unfortunate, particularly since each mill job is tied to five to seven other jobs in the state, and said he would find new areas for job growth as governor.

“There definitely are a lot of new opportunities,” he said. “The Maine Technology Institute said if you look at job growth in the state of Maine, it’s actually in the clean, renewable energy sector and they’re good paying jobs.”

The LePage campaign blamed Michaud for the closure, saying that Michaud had stalled the expansion of natural gas pipelines capacity in the state, which drove up energy costs for mills.

In 2013, Michaud voted against H.R. 1900, the Natural Gas Pipeline Permitting Reform Act, which sought to streamline the process for permitting natural gas projects. Michaud, acting in his capacity as a congressman and not a gubernatorial candidate, explained his vote in a letter he sent to LePage on September 29.

“Ultimately, H.R. 1900 is misguided legislation and would be detrimental to expanding our natural gas infrastructure in a safe and responsible manner, to say nothing of the serious long-term impact the legislation could have on our environment,” Michaud wrote.

At Helmreich, Michaud said that expanding natural gas pipeline capacity was an issue on which Maine’s governor would have to work with other New England governors, and faulted LePage for failing to do so on issues ranging from energy to substance abuse.

“When the New England governors wanted to meet to deal with the drug addiction problem [LePage] refused to meet, said it was just a photo op,” Michaud said. “Well if you take that attitude how do you expect other New England governors to work with you when you need something?”

Just after midnight on August 16, DeRay McKesson ’07 was at home in Minneapolis, watching TV coverage of the protests in Ferguson, Mo., when he decided he needed to be part of them. McKesson rented a car the next morning and made the nine-hour trip to Ferguson. He planned on protesting for two days, but ended up taking a full week off from work and staying for nine days.

The protests began on August 9 when police officer Darren Wilson, who is white, shot and killed Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man who was unarmed at the time. Police claim that Brown assaulted Wilson, but numerous witnesses offer conflicting accounts. Several witnesses describe seeing Brown raise his hands above his head just before Wilson fired the shots that proved fatal, an image that inspired one of the protestors’ mantras: “Hands up, don’t shoot."

McKesson, who works for the Minneapolis public school system, said that as someone who works in education, he was immediately struck by one stark reality of Brown’s death.

“There are a lot of great things we can do for kids around opportunity, especially kids from low-income communities,” he said. “But you have to be alive to learn.”

The protests focused on racial inequality and police discrimination against black Americans.“It is centrally about the idea that black lives matter and that Michael Brown’s blackness is not enough for him to be perceived as a deadly threat,” said McKesson, who is black. “Ferguson is a case study in systemic, structural racism.”

McKesson said that a wide range of people took part in the protests. He heard children there asking their parents why Brown was killed and whether or not they should be afraid of the police.

“It was an experience to see parents have to remind their kids that they are worthy members [of society],” McKesson said.

According to McKesson, young adults at the protests thought that they could find themselves in Brown’s position.

“At night in a hoodie, I’m another Trayvon Martin. I am not a Bowdoin grad—I’m a black guy in a hoodie,” he said. “I understand that my blackness is how people experience me first sometimes, for better or for worse, and that’s real.”

Amidst the upheaval that marked his days in Ferguson, McKesson said he was surprised and happy that his time in Ferguson was, as he put it, “a Bowdoin moment.” He spent his first nights in the area on the couch of Ivy Blackmore ’07. He bumped into Priya Sridhar ’07, who was covering the protests for the Associated Press, Will Donahoe ’08, who was protesting, and Kristina Goodwin ’10, who was providing legal aid.

Ferguson schools were closed for a few days during the protests, so volunteers taught children at the local library. McKesson was among them, as was Ross Jacobs ’10.

“It was powerful to see the College’s commitment to the social good play out in such a natural way,” McKesson said.

McKesson began to document the protests via Twitter because he was frustrated that the media—distracted by the shocking optics of the police response—had forgotten the purpose of the demonstrations, which he referred to as “principled protesting.”

Local authorities policed the protests using armored vehicles, hundreds of officers in riot gear, tear gas and rubber bullets. McKesson said the enormity of the police presence was incredible, and that the situation was often terrifying. He once found himself caught between two tear gas canisters. On another night he hid from law enforcement by crawling beneath the steering wheel of his car.

“I never thought in America that I would run and hop fences because I thought police were going to shoot me when I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said.

Despite his fear, McKesson said he always remained committed to the cause.

“You continue to protest because you believe,” he said. “You believe that what’s right outweighs the fear for your own safety.”

McKesson said that the scale of the police response speaks to the protesters’ concerns with racial inequality and structural racism.

“What the police presence does in Ferguson is immediately criminalize blackness,” he said. “The assembly of black people is immediately a criminal moment that requires every police officer in the area.”

The media’s attention has drifted away from Ferguson, but McKesson’s has not. He has returned several times and helps write a daily newsletter about the protest movement at hashtagferguson.org

McKesson said that his experiences in Ferguson have not made him more cynical, but that they have made him more vigilant.

“It was a reminder of the obligation to defend and protect democracy—the concept and reality of democracy—on all fronts,” he said. “There are more Fergusons in America.”

Top-ranked women’s field hockey (3-0 NESCAC, 3-0 overall) continued its undefeated start to the regular season this week, beating Amherst 2-1 on Saturday and shutting out Bates 2-0 on Wednesday evening. Both games were played at home.

Rachel Kennedy ’16 was named NESCAC Field Hockey Player of the Week after notching both of the team’s goals against Amherst. She continued in fine form on Wednesday evening, again scoring both of the Polar Bears’ goals. Kennedy has now scored five out  of her team’s seven total goals scored this season.

Bowdoin outshot Amherst during the first half on Saturday, but was unable to find the breakthrough goal until shortly before halftime, when Kennedy sped past two defenders in transition and slotted the ball into the left corner of the goal. 

Just 36 seconds into the second half, Kennedy struck again. Her long-range shot was deflected to the right side, where Adrienne O’Donnell ’15 recovered the rebound and directed it back to Kennedy, who then bounced the ball into the net.

Amherst caused some anxiety for the Polar Bears in the game’s dying minutes, scoring a penalty shot with fewer than five minutes left in regulation. The Lady Jeffs came close to scoring the tying goal, but goalie Hannah Gartner ’15 made two saves to preserve Bowdoin’s lead.

Head Coach Nicky Pearson said the team was happy with the result, but disappointed to have surrendered a late goal.

“They got one back, and we were disappointed that we had that breakdown,” said Pearson. “That made the end of the game a little too exciting, really.” 

Bowdoin’s performance against Bates on Wednesday night was more dominant, with Bates managing only one shot and the Polar Bears racking up 31 shots, 13 of them on goal. Pearson gave credit to Bates’ circle defense, which prevented the Polar Bears’ attack from capitalizing on its abundance of opportunities.

“Looking back on the game, we probably should have scored more,” she said. “There were times when we played into their strengths by going down the middle. In hindsight, we should have gone wider and tried to get in behind them.” 

Early in the first half, Colleen Finnerty ’16 used some nifty stick work to wiggle past a defender before finding Kennedy with a pass. From the left side of the circle, Kennedy rolled the ball across the face of goal and into the net.

The second goal came when a free hit found O’Donnell on the end line. O’Donnell passed to Kennedy, who spun away from a defender and fired a no-look reverse shot past Bates' goalie.

The Polar Bears are travelling to Vermont this weekend to take on No. 4 Middlebury, whom they have been defeated by in back-to-back NESCAC championship games—once in overtime and once on penalty strokes.

“We’re excited,” said Pearson. “They’re an incredibly talented team—they are year in and year out. They’re going to challenge us all over the field, in every aspect of our game, so we’re going to have to rise to the occasion.”

Even after two years spent working towards a Bowdoin English major and thousands of hours curled in a ball in Massachusetts Hall reading Victorian novelists, African-American poets, French deconstructionist theorists and—my personal favorite—Indian writers writing in English, the passage that most resonates with me is still one I read in high school. 

It doesn’t come from a novel that carries much intellectual cachet. It’s not old and dense like Joseph Conrad or Leo Tolstoy; it’s not postmodern and trendy like George Saunders or David Foster Wallace; it speaks more to naiveté than sophistication. 

That’s part of what makes it so important, not just for me, I think, but for our generation. The novel is J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951. It’s the quintessential book for angsty, disaffected teens, and although I was more happy-go-lucky and innocent than brooding and rebellious in tenth grade, I—like millions of high school students before me—was taken with its narrator, one Holden Caulfield. 

Members of Bowdoin Climate Action (BCA) constructed a makeshift “climate camp” on the Main Quad Wednesday night, in hopes of pressuring the College’s Board of Trustees to meet with the group next week to discuss divesting the endowment from fossil fuels. 

Sarah Nelson ’14, who took over as president of Bowdoin Student Government (BSG) Wednesday evening, informed BCA at around 5:30 p.m. yesterday that it could not have a demonstration on College property without written permission, and asked the students to dismantle the camp by 7 p.m. In response, BCA agreed to lose its status as a chartered student organization in order to prolong the protest.

A statement on the website of the Office of the Dean of Student Affairs explains, “No person shall utilize the College’s property, including photographic reproductions of its property, for commercial, business, political or public purposes without express written consent.”

Upated Feb. 18

Karen Mills, wife of President Barry Mills, announced this morning that she is stepping down as administrator of the Small Business Administration (SBA).“After four years as Administrator of the SBA, I have let President Obama know that I will not be staying for a second term. I will stay on until my successor is confirmed to ensure a smooth and seamless transition,” Mills wrote in a message to SBA colleagues.As SBA administrator, Mills worked to support small businesses and entrepreneurs nationwide. ​President Obama appointed Mills to the position in January 2009, and elevated her to the cabinet in January 2012. Prior to joining the Obama administration, Mills served as president of the MMP Group, a private equity firm based in Brunswick. She is also a founding partner of the private equity firm Solera Capital.

Mills is considered a potential candidate for Maine’s 2014 gubernatorial race, but said she had not yet considered a future political career.

In the past few months, divestment has evolved from a burgeoning movement on a handful of college campuses to a nationwide effort, though only three schools have agreed to divest their endowments from fossil fuels thus far. At Bowdoin, members of Green Bowdoin Alliance (GBA) have scaled up their efforts to push the College on the issue, and submitted a formal proposal last week that urges President Barry Mills and the Board of Trustees to divest from the top 200 publicly traded fossil fuel companies within the next five years. In a joint statement provided to the Orient on Wednesday, Mills and Paula Volent, senior vice president for investments, wrote that approximately 1.4 percent of Bowdoin’s endowment is invested in these 200 companies. The College invests in them through large commingled funds that contain hundreds of other stocks. Divesting from fossil fuels would require a turnover of over 25 percent of the endowment, according to the statement.

The Brunswick Police Department (BPD) arrested Holly Lorms, assistant coach of the women’s ice hockey team, around 10:45 p.m. Sunday night on suspicion that she had crashed her SUV while under the influence of alcohol, according to the Bangor Daily News. Lorms’ Lexus SUV veered off of Sills Drive, crossed a divider—narrowly missing several trees—drove over a portion of the Polar Loop parking lot, and crashed into the east side of Druckenmiller Hall. On Monday afternoon, dark black tire marks were visible on Sills Drive. A small section of bricks had been dislodged from the wall of Druckenmiller Hall. Lorms, Interim Athletic Director Tim Ryan, and women's ice hockey Head Coach Marissa O’Neil all declined comment.

On January 13, Madison Whitley ’13, Orient co-business manager, spotted a hat in SeaWorld’s San Diego store that featured a polar bear with a striking resemblance to the College’s mascot. She tweeted a photo to @bowdoincollege, and by January 18 the College had started investigating SeaWorld for possible violations of trademark and copyright law. If SeaWorld did indeed steal the image of the Bowdoin Polar Bear, it also stole a part of Bowdoin’s soul. The College relies heavily on polar bear symbolism and metaphor. Any ensuing legal battle will be a struggle to reclaim the College’s primary means of representing itself, and a key component of its institutional identity.

Maine voters made history last Tuesday when they elected Angus King to the United States Senate and approved same-sex marriage. Both historic moments marked the culmination of hard-fought campaigns, but neither King nor marriage equality advocates had much time to rest after last week’s victories.

King announced on Wednesday that he would caucus with the Democrats, after discussions with Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, fellow Independent Senator Bernie Sanders, and other members of Congress. The Boston Globe reported yesterday that King hopes for a seat on the Senate Finance Committee, an assignment that is not typically given to freshmen senators. 

Yesterday afternoon, King told the Orient that committee assignments are “very much up in the air” and will not likely be finalized for about a week, pending discussions between Senate Democrats and Republicans. 

King said that his first priority will be to make the Senate work, through filibuster reform and a number of other changes.

“If we can’t get the Senate to work, then we can’t get to the other issues,” he said. 

After that, King said, he will turn his attention to addressing fiscal issues. He noted that while some motions will be put forward to address the impending fiscal cliff during the lame duck session, there will still be much work to do after Congress convenes in January.

Now that same-sex marriage is legal in Maine, LGBT advocates still have their work cut out. Tim Diehl, board president of Equality Maine, one of the partners in the Mainers United for Marriage coalition, said the group is working to disseminate information on the new law.

“Equality Maine will be involved in insuring that the information is available about where and how to get marriage licenses,” said Diehl. “We will work also with the state legislature to insure the law is implemented as it was passed.”

Diehl said that Equality Maine is not an organization whose goal revolves entirely around marriage equality for same-sex couples. Its aims are more general. 

“It’s an advocacy and civil right organization for LGBT people and their families. Marriage is but one issue we’re focused on. We’ll continue to focus on issues where discrimination or inequality exists,” he said. 

Diehl said his organization will delve into other LGBT issues without fear of same-sex marriage being repealed.

 “I think that issues like equality and social justice-related matters only become more positively perceived by voters over time,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine taking a step back with Maine voters on this issue.”

—Linda Kinstler contributed to this report.

Students watching election results in Jack Magee’s Pub erupted in cheers when NBC News declared Barack Obama the winner of the presidential election on Tuesday night.  The results of local races and ballot measures—two of which made national headlines—also prompted celebrations from most students in the crowd.

Maine approved same-sex marriage with roughly 53 percent of voters residents voting “yes” on Question 1. In Brunswick, over 67 percent of voters supported the measure. Maine, along with Maryland and Washington, became the first state to institute same-sex marriage by popular vote.

Jordan Lantz ’15 interned on Mainers United for Marriage’s campaign for a “yes” vote on Question 1. He said campaign staffers felt not joy, but relief when they heard the result.

Seventy-six percent of Bowdoin students will cast their votes for Barack Obama in next Tuesday’s presidential election, while 16 percent will vote for Mitt Romney, according to an unscientific poll conducted by the Orient. Two percent of students plan to vote for Libertarian Gary Johnson, one percent for Green Part candidate Jill Stein, and three percent remain undecided. The poll, which was distributed via email and digest post, received 719 responses between October 29 and November 1.

Nicholas Kristof spoke to a packed crowd at Pickard Theater last night about his 2009 book, “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.” The book—co-authored by his wife, Sheryl WuDunn—explores what Kristof refers to as “the central moral challenge of the 21st century,” combatting the oppression and effective enslavement of women and girls around the world.

The Brunswick Police Department (BPD) discovered 126 marijuana plants, along with numerous semiautomatic weapons and ballistic vests, large amounts of cash, and dozens of illegal prescription pills when it attempted to arrest Brunswick resident Aaron Fickett on unrelated charges during a March 12 visit to his apartment. Officers Kristian Oberg and Matthew Swan were on a routine patrol when they happened to run the license plate of Fickett, 27. They found an outstanding warrant for his arrest, issued when he failed to appear in court for charges of carrying a concealed weapon and refusing to submit to arrest.

Students who hail from far-flung corners of the country and cannot travel home for the Thanksgiving holiday can take heart in a proposal put forward to the faculty on Monday.

"Let there not be light" was the refrain in Baxter House throughout the month of October, when the house was competing in the 10th annual "Do it in the Dark" Energy Conservation Dorm Competition. The motto paid off —Baxter House took away the prize, boasting a 40 percent reduction in energy use. Moore Hall won among first year dorms with a reduction of 26 percent, and Baxter and West Hall were winners for largest reduction between affiliates.

The Bowdoin Cable Network (BCN) is going online. BCN General Manager Lidey Heuck '13 confirmed that, starting this semester, the network's movie content will be made available on-demand on the Internet.