The Bowdoin Orient

DeRay Mckesson ’07 has run for office before. While his campaign to become mayor of Baltimore will be his first run for public office, Mckesson was president of the Bowdoin Class of 2007 three times and president of the Bowdoin Student Government twice. 

Mckesson is currently one of the most well-known faces of the Black Lives Matter movement as well as Campaign Zero, a policy-focused campaign to end police violence. He filed his papers to run in the mayoral race just before the deadline on Wednesday night and announced his candidacy in a post on Medium.

“In order to achieve the promise of our city and become the Baltimore we know we can become, we must challenge the practices that have not and will not lead to transformation,” Mckesson wrote.

Running for mayor of Baltimore appears to have been on Mckesson’s mind over ten years ago when he was still at Bowdoin.

In a 2005 article about Mckesson, the Orient wrote, “After a summer’s work at the Juvenile Division of the Baltimore City State Attorney’s Office, DeRay has seen the myriad problems facing his Maryland hometown. Ultimately, he would love to work in government as an elected executive official—perhaps eventually as the mayor of Baltimore.”

He talked about the possibility of running for mayor in an article in New York Magazine in November, but Wednesday’s announcement still came as a surprise to many.

Mckesson was the last candidate to announce his campaign before the Democratic primary on April 26, which is widely expected to determine who the next mayor will be.

Mckesson’s announcement struck an optimistic tone, but he emphasized that traditional politics have not been successful at improving the city of Baltimore.

“I have come to realize that the traditional pathway to politics—and the traditional politicians who follow these well-worn paths—will not lead us to the transformational change our city needs,” Mckesson wrote.

He said he would release a full policy platform soon but referenced transparency and accountability as well as safety, job development, job access, grade-level reading, transportation and college readiness as issues he would focus on. 

Mckesson joins a crowded field of roughly a dozen candidates, including a former mayor, a state senator and two city councilmen. While he is widely known around the country for his activism, Mckesson faces an uphill battle as a non-traditional candidate.

According to the Washington Post, he would be the first political outsider elected mayor of Baltimore in modern history. 

“It is true that I am a non-traditional candidate — I am not a former mayor, city councilman, state legislator, philanthropist or the son of a well-connected family. I am an activist, organizer, former teacher and district administrator that intimately understands how interwoven our challenges and our solutions are,” wrote Mckesson, who was born and raised in Baltimore and moved back roughly a year ago. “I am a son of Baltimore.”

After graduating from Bowdoin in 2007, Mckesson worked in the Minneapolis Public School System before leaving his job to become a full-time activist. 

He’ll have to rely on his abilities to energize and organize voters that have made him so successful as an activist. 

As of press time, Mckesson had raised over $40,000 from over 650 donors through the online fundraising site crowdpac.com.

If his campaign is successful, Mckesson will join a host of other Bowdoin alumni—including current Mayor of San Francisco Ed Lee ’74—who have held elected public office.

It was a banner day for Bowdoin Athletics, as three out of four teams playing in NESCAC championship games brought home the title. The Polar Bears had never won more than two NESCAC titles in a season.

The field hockey team was first to win, beating Middlebury 2-1 on Howard F. Ryan Field to capture the team's first NESCAC championship since 2011.  Men's soccer edged out Wesleyan 1-0 in OT at host site Middlebury to win the team's second NESCAC championship in a row. Women's volleyball beat Williams 3-2 at home to win Bowdoin's third NESCAC championship of the day. Women's soccer was the only team in a championship to lose today, falling to Williams 2-0.

The teams had made history before the games even began: It was the first time since 2004 that one school was represented in all four of the NESCAC's fall championships.

The field hockey team has been in the NESCAC championship match every year since 2010, but this year's title win is their first since 2011. The Polar Bears snapped Middlebury's three-year NESCAC championship streak with the 2-1 victory.

Rachel Kennedy '16 scored the first goal of the game and Emily McColgan '17 scored the game winner 19 minutes into the second half. 

The team improved to 17-0 on the season. They will play their first game of the NCAA tournament later this week.

The men's soccer team clinched an automatic spot in the NCAA tournament with their victory. The win was Head Coach Scott Wiercinski's second NESCAC championship in three years as the team's coach.

Captain Andrew Jones '16 scored in the first sudden death overtime to break the scoreless tie and give the Polar Bears a 1-0 win.

The women's volleyball team rallied from two sets down and won the last three to defeat Williams 3-2. The win was the Polar Bear's second NESCAC title.

Head Coach Erin Cady is in her first season with the team. Captain Christy Jewett '16 had a team-high 17 kills.  

The team will have a bid to the NCAA tournament when the bracket is announced tomorrow morning.

The second-seeded Polar Bears lost 2-0 to top-seeded Williams, who improved to 16-1-1 on the season. Bowdoin (12-5-1) will have to wait until tomorrow afternoon to find out if they receive an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament. 

Yesterday, the women's rugby team won its fourth straight New England Small College Rugby Conference championship with an 88-0 win over Tufts. 

The team will host a Division II playoff game on Saturday. 

Twenty-five years ago this week, a group of 50 students blocked the entrances to the College’s administration building for four hours in protest of the lack of faculty diversity at Bowdoin. At the time, Bowdoin had just nine faculty members of color.

Since then, the College has emphasized the need to improve the racial diversity of its faculty, embarking on several initiatives toward that end. Results have been mixed: the number of professors of color on campus has increased, but that growth has been slow and uneven, and lagged behind many of Bowdoin’s peers.

Last year, there were a total of 32 minority members of the entire 235-person faculty, good for 13.6 percent of Bowdoin’s faculty, according to the College’s Common Data Set.

Many of the same obstacles that Bowdoin faced in creating a diverse faculty in 1990 still challenge the College today. 

Randy Stakeman, associate professor of history and Africana studies emeritus, was the associate dean of academic affairs from 1991-1994 and at times in the 1980s and 1990s the only African-American professor at Bowdoin. He listed four challenges to creating a diverse faculty: the departmental hiring process, conscious and unconscious biases, the demography of specific fields and the unattractiveness of Bowdoin’s location.

“None of these is an excuse not to pursue faculty diversity, nor to throw up your hands at the impossibility,” Stakeman said in a phone interview with the Orient. “They are simply obstacles to be overcome.”

“Those all remain challenges, but we have worked towards mitigating some of the effects of those challenges,” said Interim Dean for Academic Affairs Jennifer Scanlon.

Scanlon said that the biggest challenge for Bowdoin now is addressing people’s implicit biases.

“That is inherent in our culture, people of color exhibit unconscious bias, white people exhibit unconscious bias, it is part of the water that we swim in, the air that we breathe. But that doesn’t excuse it in any way. So we have to make sure that we employ principles but also talk honestly and openly about these things," Scanlon said.

Today, the College’s efforts to create a racially diverse faculty are a part of each faculty search. The Faculty Diversity Committee has five members, one of whom sits on the search committee for every faculty opening.

The representative from the Faculty Diversity Committee is involved in a search from the time a position opens up until after the new faculty member is on campus. He or she is tasked with providing an outside perspective on the search committee and ensuring that candidates from a range of backgrounds, subfields and graduate programs are considered.

“It’s not just about the pool of candidates,” said Scanlon. “It’s also about our ability to fairly read applications and CVs and think long term and clearly about what fit means, what excellence means, what success means in a broader way.”

The College has also hired Romney Associates, a consulting firm, to help search committees think about how they can be conscious of diversity during every step of a search process.

While Bowdoin has changed its hiring process to include a member of the Faculty Diversity Committee in every search to recruit more broadly and to educate the committee about potential biases, it cannot do anything to change its location.

Bates, Bowdoin and Colby had three of the four lowest percentages of minority faculty in the NESCAC in 2014.

“Maine is overwhelmingly white. Maine is overwhelmingly rural. We are in a small town,” said Associate Professor of Africana Studies and History Brian Purnell. “If you are black, or you are Hispanic, or from another country—if you are used to a vibrant, bustling metropolis, this world will be small, it will have limited options for you to pursue yourself, and it is quiet.”

Marilyn Reizbaum, the Harrison King McCann professor of English, was part of a 1992 Subcommittee on Diversity and the ad hoc committee in 2008 that issued a report on increasing faculty diversity. She cautioned against seeing location as an impenetrable problem.

“I think [Bowdoin’s location] can be a concern, but sometimes it is an excuse— a self-fulfilling prophecy and productive of circular reasoning,” Reizbaum wrote in an email to the Orient. “Bowdoin is a desirable place to work and can be very attractive. There can be a directed address by the college to the diverse needs of a diverse community, which will be welcoming to faculty who are being recruited.”

Indeed, Purnell emphasized that despite Maine’s relatively homogenous nature, his personal experience as an African-American professor at Bowdoin has been largely positive.

“I feel supported in my work, I feel like I’m able to raise a happy healthy family, I’m able to teach my children about race and class in America, and difference, so I flow well here. That might not be the norm for everybody, but it is for me,” Purnell said.

“It’s a slow process, but I don’t know, this is the question I would have: what are the other schools doing differently to get there faster?” said Staci Williams Seeley ’90, who was president of the African-American Society during her senior year and President of the Alumni Council from 2010 to 2012.  “And the answer can’t be ‘Maine is a white state.’ Vermont is a white state, Connecticut, there are places where there are NESCAC schools where there is far more progress. For a good opportunity, for the right opportunity, the right scholar is going to come along.”

Bowdoin has a program for Target of Opportunity Hires, which allow departments to hire outside of the normal openings if talented minority candidates come along.

“I would still maintain that we should have a target of opportunity process, but the hardest work should take place on the part of the faculty and that is hiring a diverse faculty pool through the regular search process,” Scanlon said.

The College is also part of the Consortium for Faculty Diversity (CFD), which sends post-doctoral fellows to schools around the country. Bowdoin currently has five CFD fellows, but according the Scanlon, the goal of the program is bigger than increasing Bowdoin’s faculty diversity.

“My thought about the CFD program is that it is a larger institutional commitment—that there are many people of diverse backgrounds who are not that familiar with the small liberal arts college,” Scanlon said.

Bowdoin usually does not have openings to offer CFD fellows full-time offers, but hopes that they will end up in a small liberal arts college.

“The CFD program is not as narrow as diversifying the faculty at Bowdoin, it is also about diversifying the professoriate,” Scanlon said. “It’s a commitment that Bowdoin makes that applies to Bowdoin, but it’s also larger than Bowdoin.”

Yale announced earlier this week that they would invest $50 million in an initiative to fund new minority faculty hires in all of the University’s schools. It joins other large universities that have made high-profile financial commitments to faculty diversity in recent years, including Columbia in 2012.

“We’re not Yale,” Scanlon said. “We don’t have $50 million, so we have to find our own ways, our own Bowdoin ways, to keep this alive and to educate people about the importance of diversity among the faculty, and have people feel like it’s a community effort.”

“I think we should always be on the lookout for new approaches and keep an eye on how other institutions are doing their searching and trying to retain faculty,” said William D. Shipman Professor of Economics John Fitzgerald, who has been at the College since 1983 and was the chair of the ad hoc group on increasing faculty diversity in 2008. “It’s an ongoing process. I don’t think there’s an end goal and I don’t think there is a silver bullet. It’s a matter of trying to continually improve how we operate.”

According to Bowdoin’s Office of Institutional Research, 14 out of 119 tenured faculty in 2014 were minorities. The percentage of tenured faculty who are minorities has increased gradually over the past 10 years, but has been consistently below the overall percentage of minority faculty.

Part of the reason for this may be that while diversity is considered in the hiring process, it is not part of the tenure process.

“Tenure is based on excellence in teaching, distinction in scholarship and service to the College. So those are the sole criteria,” said Scanlon.

The fluctuations in faculty diversity are likely due to professors who are not brought to Bowdoin for the long term.

“The big concern is getting people who are tenured at the College. You can always have full time faculty and staff that come in for a year, maybe two, but if you’re not tenured, they’re not going to really have any vested interest in staying at the college for an extended period and that’s what it seems that Bowdoin still needs to work on,” said Karen Hinds ’93.

Minority faculty members have been an important part of the student experience at the College.

“People bring a lot more when they’re trying to learn than just going from tabula rasa to informed individual,” said Purnell. “Some people have to work through more stuff than just mastering the material. It helps to have a mentor for some people… I think that’s a role that some minority students want, or need.”

“I certainly felt very cared for and nurtured and attended to by faculty of color, that they considered mentoring students of color, black students in particular to be part of the deal, part of their job. And they did it with a lot of skill and care and attention and time,” said Seeley.

In addition to personal mentoring, minority faculty serve as role models for students.

“I think it’s the same with when you see a woman in front of the classroom. It really encourages you—especially if you’re interested in academia, but really interested in any position of power, I think it’s so important to just have representation at the head of the classroom,” said Elina Zhang ’16.

Michelle Kruk ’16 agreed about the importance of the perspective that minority faculty can bring to students of color.

“They’ve been able to speak to me in a way that others haven’t,” Kruk said. “I’ve had faculty of color—not just at Bowdoin, but even in high school—who have seen that I’m not getting something, and then they’ll use an example from their life experiences, or from the experience they know will resonate with me, and then I’ll be like, ‘oh shoot, I got it, this is what this means.’”

The diversity of the faculty also impacts what kinds of courses the College can offer.

“Having faculty who are diverse in certain departments, it definitely encourages a diversity of students to pursue those disciplines, and that was really really important to me. I also think that it creates a more diverse course load—for example, when you bring in these new faculty members, they will teach courses that aren’t in the typical canon,” said Zhang.

Faculty also feel that diversity is also important for the College as a whole.

“It makes the college be part of the evolving diversification of the US. In part, to teach students an enhanced perspective is one of the objectives of the college, and a diverse faculty allows us to do that,” Fitzgerald said.

“People bring different things to the table, people bring different questions to what it means to learn and how to learn and what it is we need to learn. And so the richest intellectual environment will be one that is more diverse,” added Scanlon.

While some argue that a focus on diversity leads to lower standards, Rose doesn’t see it that way.

“This issue is not one of surrendering any of those standards. This issue is of doing the work to find the really great teachers and scholars of color and then to consider them in a real and robust way in the process,” Rose said.

The protest on November 2, 1990 was organized by the Coalition of Concerned Students, a collection of students from different groups which included the African American Society, the Latin American Students Organization, the Bowdoin Women’s Association, the Bowdoin Jewish Organization and Bowdoin Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders. They demanded action by recently-inaugurated President Bob Edwards and wanted a more diverse student body, a more diverse faculty and a gay and lesbian studies program.

The Coalition wanted a response to their demands by November 2, but after Edwards released a memorandum on October 31 that the students from the Coalition deemed “unacceptable,” they decided to protest. The demonstration was the culmination of discussions that started between the various groups earlier that year and were also catalyzed by the departure of one of Bowdoin’s two African-American professors, Gayle Pemberton, that summer.

Edwards met with five student representatives that day and released a statement with a plan that satisfied the students enough for them to stop the blockade.

Hinds (then Karen Edwards) was one of the students who met with Edwards that day, and said that faculty diversity important for the same reasons today that it was in 1990.

“Bowdoin needs to represent what’s going on around the globe,” Hinds said in a phone interview with the Orient. “And yes, Bowdoin is located in Maine and yes, it’s a difficult place to attract people to because of location and the weather and everything else that goes along, but if you’re a higher education environment you need to represent what’s going on in the world.”

In the fall of 1992, “The Report of the Subcommittee on Diversity” was released, which provided recommendations about recruiting more diverse students, improving the minority student experience and creating a more diverse faculty. The report listed Bowdoin as having the lowest percentage of minority faculty members amongst 16 other peer schools.

In 2014, Bowdoin had ninth highest percentage of minority faculty members in the NESCAC out of 11 schools, according to their respective Common Data Sets.

The report also set goals for gender diversity among the faculty and for the racial diversity of the student body. Last year, the faculty was 50.2 percent women; 15 years earlier, 37.4 percent of the faculty were women, according to the Office of Institutional Research. This year, 31.5 percent of students are minorities; 15 years earlier, 13.3 percent of students were minorities.

“We’ve definitely been slower [to diversify the faculty than the student body]. There’s a whole admissions office; there are mechanisms in place that have been in place for some time to increase student diversity,” said Scanlon.

One of the goals stated in “The Report of the Subcommittee on Diversity” in 1992 was that “The percentage of faculty members of color should equal that of minority holders of Ph.D.’s.”

In 2013, 22 percent of doctorate recipients in the life sciences, physical sciences, social sciences and humanities were minorities according to the National Science Foundation.

“Pinning it to the number of PhDs, that’s arbitrary,” said Stakeman. “You have to take advantage to get every possible diverse faculty member you can.”

While “The Report of the Subcommittee on Diversity” in 1992 set specific goals, the College no longer uses numbers as benchmarks.

Zhang said that faculty diversity should reflect the diversity of Bowdoin students.

“The faculty demographic should be matching the student demographic, and it’s definitely not,” she said.

Others emphasized more intangible benchmarks of success.

“In a sense, you never achieve success. There is no number that you can get to or point to that is the kind of break even mark that you can say, ah, we have 10 faculty of color, it just doesn’t work like that. What you’re trying to do is create a campus and a faculty in which there are many many diverse viewpoints. How many diverse viewpoints should there be on the faculty? You can’t answer that question,” said Stakeman.

“We’re doing our work. That doesn’t mean we’re satisfied, that doesn’t mean we’re resting on our laurels— we’re in fact doubling down on the work that we have to do. Whatever the numbers say or don’t say, we’re doing the work we’re doing, not in response necessarily to a set of numbers, but in response to what we clearly know we need to do,” said Scanlon.

Scanlon suggested that no one measure will indicate when Bowdoin has achieved the level of faculty diversity it desires.

“We’ll just have a richer community, and we’ll know that we'll have a richer community, and we’ll find it less hard to do the work that we’re doing, and it will become a natural part of who we are and what we do,” Scanlon said.

Stanley Druckenmiller ’75 called her work phenomenal and former President Barry Mills described her as world class. When it was announced on Tuesday that Bowdoin’s endowment returned 14.4 percent last year and is now valued at $1.393 billion, President Clayton Rose credited its continued success to Senior Vice President for Investments Paula Volent and her team. 

“What Paula has done is unbelievable,” Rose said.

Volent has been overseeing the College’s endowment since 2000, but she first arrived at the College long before she even considered a career in finance. 

On January 2, 1981, the Lewiston Journal ran an announcement that Paula Volent—a recent graduate from the University of New Hampshire—had been hired as a curatorial assistant at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (BCMA). She’d just finished her undergraduate degree in art history and chemistry and was planning on working in the art world. 

“One of the stories of my life is that there’s lots of transitions; lots of opportunities came up, and I was open to taking advantage of some of the serendipity,” Volent said.  

After working at the BCMA, she went on to graduate school in art conservation at NYU, worked at the New York Historical Society, the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts and the LA County Museum of Art and opened her own paper conservation studio in Venice, California. While running her own business, she thought that she should have some financial knowledge. 

“I realized running my own business...that I didn’t really have the skill set to read a balance sheet or the finance skills,” Volent said. “So I started taking a couple of finance classes at UCLA at night, and I was very good at it.”

Her professor suggested that she go to business school and become a museum director. 

“I thought it was crazy,” Volent said. “But it sort of stuck in my mind. So I did apply.”

At the same time she was accepted to Yale School of Management, Volent was also offered a fellowship at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C, to work on contemporary works of art. She deferred her admission to Yale and went to work in D.C., but eventually made her way back to New Haven.

However, shortly after she arrived at Yale to start her first semester, her daughter was born. Volent took a semester off and went knocking on the door of the Yale Investments Office. 

“I thought if I was going to work at a not-for-profit institution like a museum, I needed to learn about endowments,” Volent said. Chief Investment Officer David Swensen was on the other side of that door at Yale, and he gave her a shot. 

Swensen is often noted as one of the top investors in the world; he’s mentored a handful of successful proteges—Volent among them. 

She started off in his office as an intern after only one semester of business school.

“I didn’t know all of this nomenclature about finance. It was all mysterious to me,” she said.Volent ended up working in that office for a few years. 

“I fell in love with finance and endowments,” Volent said.

Nineteen years after she was originally hired as a BCMA curatorial assistant, Volent returned to Bowdoin in July 2000 as the associate treasurer. 

“I really wanted to come back to Maine because I love the geography of Maine and the place,” Volent said. 

It’s been 15 years since Volent arrived at Bowdoin for the second time. Though her title changed to Vice President for Investments in 2002 and Senior Vice President for Investments in 2006, her responsibilites have remained largely the same. Volent is charged with managing the College’s endowment with the help of the entire endowment office and the College’s investment committee. 

Under her watch, the endowment has grown from about $465 million to $1.393 billion. Volent has seen the endowment through the dot com bubble and the recession and consistently posted returns above the national average. In Fiscal Year 2014, the endowment was named Endowment of the Year. 

Although the switch from art conservation to endowments may seem an about-face, Volent finds the jobs similar.

“People always say, ‘what a big switch you made from doing art history and art conservation to finance,’ and I really feel like the intellectual curiosity and sort of excitement every day in going into my job is similar,” she said.

Volent lives in Cape Elizabeth and makes the commute in to Brunswick. 

“I love Bowdoin. I’m very loyal to Bowdoin. I think it’s one of the very best places,” Volent said. “Working with Barry Mills has been one of the highlights of my life, and I think it’s going to be really exciting to work for Clayton.”

She’s seen the College through three presidents—Bob Edwards, Mills and now, Rose. 

“I think Bowdoin keeps getting improved,” Volent said. “When I first came to Bowdoin in 2000, especially on the investments side, people didn’t really know what Bowdoin was, and now we’re very well known. Barry did an amazing job. I think Clayton is going to bring the College to the next step for thinking about higher education in the future.”

Volent is still heavily involved in the arts. She’s on the advisory committee for the BCMA and the investment committee for the American Institute for Conservation. 

“I don’t do any art myself, really, because I don’t have time,” Volent said, “But I would like to slow down and get back into that. As an art conservator, you have to be proficient in studio art because you’re actually going to fill in damages on a work of art. At one point I did a lot of my own.” 

But for now, the endowment keeps Volent busy—she flies back and forth to Bowdoin’s satellite investment office in New York City weekly, and often travels across the country and around the globe for meetings with investment managers. 

“Being in investments is really interesting. One day you’re thinking about what’s going on in China and the next about global politics, and the next minute you’re diving deep into the balance sheet of a company,” Volent said. “I’m really always looking for the best investments for Bowdoin so we can support financial aid and grow the endowment.”

The women’s swimming team had four top-20 finishes at the Division III Championship last week in Shenandoah, Texas, though they did not qualify for the finals in any event. 

It was the first time since 2012 that the team was represented at nationals and the five swimmers were the most that the team has sent to nationals in over a decade.

“This was a surprise for us,” said captain Patty Boyer ’15. “We didn’t really expect to get to go to NCAAs, we didn’t expect to swim fast enough to even have a chance at qualifying, so that in itself was a surprise. What was also a surprise was how well we did considering we hadn’t planned for this to happen.”

“There was a lot of energy. It was a really good place to be. Everyone wanted to do well and everyone was fast and it was just fun,” said Mariah Rawding ’18.  

The team competed in four relays and Rawding competed in three individual events. Rawding finished 18th in the 100 breaststroke (1:04.89), 21st in the 200 breaststroke (2:21.60) and 32nd in the 50 freestyle (23.90). 

Rawding, Boyer, Bridget Killian ’16 and Sophia Walker ’17 finished 19th in the 200 freestyle relay (1:35.94) and 21st in the 200 medley (1:46.94). Killian, Rawding, Lela Garner ’16 and Walker finished 18th in the 400 freestyle relay (3:29.51) and 17th in the 400 medley relay (3:54.48).

Because none of the five swimmers had ever been to nationals, they did not have experience training during  the four-week stretch after the NESCAC championships. 

“Everyone did a really great job considering we weren’t really sure how our training was going to pay off,” Boyer said. “I think we are all, and should be, happy for how we swam, and for staying close to how we swam at NESCACs.” 

The new training schedule proved to be the biggest challenge for the team.

“You have to really commit to it, that’s the hardest part,” said Rawding. “I think the mental part over the four weeks was really hard.”

“You can swim a race and go really fast and never be able to make that time again,” Boyer said. “Being able to do it twice in a row, five weeks apart with whacky training is a really great accomplishment.”

After a preliminary race, the top 16 finishers qualified for the finals. No Bowdoin swimmer qualified for the finals.

“It was right on what I expected us to do, we swam very close to the times we did at the conference meet,” said Head Coach Brad Burnham. “I think we were hoping to finish in the top 16, to be All-American. That would have made it really great.” 

“Our goal was to make it back to finals,” said Boyer. “We were positioned going into the event to be in them [based on qualifying time], but because of not dropping enough time or other teams getting faster, we didn’t make it back, so that was disappointing. Overall I think we have things to be happy about.”

“Individually, I wanted to go a little faster,’” said Rawding.“Overall I was happy.” 

Killian—who set a school record in her leg of the 400 freestyle relay (52.09)—Garner, Rawding, and Walker will have the chance to qualify for nationals again next year. 

“Now that they understand what the meet is like and the interval between the conference championships and the nationals and what kind of training we need to do, I think we’ll be prepared for next year,” Burnham said.

In 1915, David Endicott Putnam won the Camp Becket Honor Emblem, an award given to campers based on the strength of their character.

Two years later, Putnam, who would come to be known as the “Ace of Aces,” left his job as a counselor at Camp Becket to fight in World War I. In September 1918, his SPAD XIII plane was shot down over France and Putnam was killed. The U.S. Army posthumously awarded him the Distinguished Service Cross. He was 20 years old when he died.

At the dedication of the 9/11 Museum last spring, President Obama spoke about the Man in the Red Bandana, Welles Crowther. While everyone else ran down the stairs, Crowther, a former volunteer firefighter working in the World Trade Center, ran deeper into the building to help get others out. Welles had been a Becket camper and was a quintessential example of one of the camp mottos, Help the Other Fellow.

This summer, I’ll be on staff at Becket, just like Putnam was nearly a century ago. But a funny thing happens when I tell people what my plans are for the summer.

“Really? Oh, that’s nice,” my friends’ parents say. “Nice” lingers, as if they’re not sure if it was really what they meant. My friends ask if it’s going to be my last summer or say I’m too old to be a camper. The Career Planning Center insists that I get an internship. 

I get defensive when I tell people that I plan to return for my thirteenth consecutive summer at camp and my fifth on staff. The overachiever inside of me has an urge to justify why I’m not applying for a competitive internship program or a research grant.

I want to tell them about David Putnam and Welles Crowther. But the truth is I’m not going back to camp this summer simply because I think that Becket will make me more like David Putnam or Welles Crowther. Nor do I have any illusions about my ability to turn my campers into national heroes in four weeks, although mature, thoughtful fourteen-year-old boys would be a good start.

Every Sunday afternoon, my phone lights up with the weekly edition of “Jobs and Events I May Be Interested In.” In fact, many of the jobs do interest me. I think I’d like being a White House Intern or a Future Global Leader or a Google Journalism Fellow.

I’d also like to sit in a rocking chair on the porch of the library overlooking the lake and have to put a sweatshirt on because the sun is quickly descending behind the birch trees. I’d like to watch as my campers try to navigate a twenty-five foot, hundred-year-old canoe back to the dock. I’d like to remind them to hang up their wet life jackets.

If I get to be surrounded by the Bowdoin Pines for nine months of the year, I want to be surrounded by the birch trees of the Berkshires for the other three. I want my clothes to smell like a campfire and my arms to be covered in mosquito bites. I want to relive the best days of my childhood and share them with my campers, despite that fact that many people do not consider it the best preparation for my impending adulthood.

My friends and I are stuck in a tug of war between what we want to do for the summer and what we’re told we should do. We’re lucky if nothing is pulling on the should end of the rope. We’re even luckier if the want and should ends are the same.

I hope the Offer of the College is wrong. I hope my time at Bowdoin is not the best four years of my life, but I do hope that the summers in between my years at Bowdoin are the best of my life because they are the last summers of my youth. After college, summer is just a season.

My friends have good, fun, relaxing, boring, warm summers. They sell vacuums and ice cream and stocks. They study Arabic and physics and poverty. They sit on the beach and in cubicles and on subways.

Walking around campus at the end of August, you need more than two hands to count the number of people who ask, “How was your summer?”

I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say they had a terrible summer, but I don’t see people’s eyes light up when they talk about their summers either. It seems that few people have a story they’re excited to tell.

Two years ago, my summer story was about a camper whose family life was so turbulent that nobody could make the trip to see him on visiting day. He pulled me aside before boarding the bus home on the last morning. He looked up at me and said, in an expression of emotion jarringly earnest for a pubescent boy, “you’re like the good big brother I’ve never had.”

Last year it was a story about helping a group of campers—campers who are much cooler than I was or will be—build a cabin that will house hundreds of campers over the next few decades.  

When I return to Bowdoin in August, I hope I have another story. I hope my eyes light up when someone asks me about my summer. I hope the excitement I feel to be back at Bowdoin will be matched by the sadness I feel that summer is over. 

Matthew Gutschenritter is a member of the Class of 2016.

The Orient has circulated approval ratings surveys amongst the student body each fall and spring since 2010. This spring, 330 students responded to the survey.

Throughout the school year, students flock to campus venues to hear their favorite a cappella groups perform. Whether the event is the large holiday concert in Pickard or a more intimate, laidback gathering in Ladd House, the performances are well attended almost without exception. However, there is a lot more to the world of a cappella than belting out your favorite Macklemore song in the chapel. There are logistics involved: organizing auditions, obtaining recording funds and the ongoing effort to dispel the prevalent notion of tense rivalries between groups.

The A Cappella Council, spearheaded by Noah Gavil ’14, works to facilitate communication between the six groups to ensure that these logistics run as smoothly as possible. Although the groups perform together three times a year, their contact is otherwise fairly limited, and the Council has recently been working to change that.

“This year, for the first time that I remember, we had a big meeting between all the other groups to work through some of the kinks,” said Kevin Miao ’14 of the Longfellows. “In the past, it was much more fragmented and there wasn’t much communication.”

One of the most important aspects of this communication occurs during audition period. At the beginning of the year, each group goes around to the first year bricks to do “dorm sings,” making sure not to overlap too closely with anyone else. Interested students then sign up for auditions later in the week.

“People kind of do their own thing with auditions, but it’s mostly a variation of the same thing,” said Gavil, who added that after the first wave of auditions, leaders from each group consult to create a schedule for callbacks. This way, if someone gets a callback from two groups, they can attend both.

“There’s a big draft through all the groups where we talk about who wants whom,” said Erica Nangeroni ’14 of the coed group BOKA. “If we have someone we really can’t make a decision on we say, ‘Hey, you got into a couple groups; you have a few minutes to decide which one you want to be in.’ It’s a little high pressure.”

As a side note, Nangeroni added, “We tend to have more girls audition than guys. The general trend is that boys are pulled a little bit more towards all-male groups and girls are pulled more towards coed group.”

“There have been occasions where someone has been in two groups, but it is somewhat discouraged,” said Gavil. “They are always in one group first and then if they want to be in another group, they can audition in later years.”

The lack of overlap in groups could feed the idea of their being rivalries amongst them, but Gavil, a member of Ursus Verses, maintains that this is not the case.

“It’s all artificial to me—it’s sort of funny,” he said. “I think any rivalries are not real rivalries—they’re not like Seahawks and 49ers—and I think what is cool is that all the groups definitely have their own vibe, and their sort of type of repertoire and type of presentation.”

Meddiebempster Michael Yang ’14 agreed, highlighting the difference in presentation between the two all-male groups. Where the Meddiebempsters (Meddies) are more “barbershop and tongue-in-cheek,” according to Yang, the Longfellows have a slightly more modern style in terms of song choice, arrangement and choreography.

“We sing completely different things,” said Miao. “The kinds of kids who are attracted to the Longfellows aren’t necessarily attracted to what the Meddies bring to the table and [vice versa].”However, just because such rivalries do not exist does not mean that they never did.

“I know that my freshman year, some of the Meddie/Longfellow seniors—I don’t even know who—just personally didn’t like each other, and that grew into a group thing,” said Yang.

“We have been trying to get rid of the perception of rivalries. I’ve loved a lot of Longfellows…As long as both groups are good, then that is a great thing,” he added.

Nangeroni expressed similar sentiments.

“When I was younger, there were more rigid rivalries so to speak,” she said. “I think there was just a little bit more contention when I was an underclassman, and I can’t really say why.”

She added that Thursday night’s Bursurka­­—a joint concert with BOKA and Ursus Verses—is a good way to dissolve the notion of rivalries.

“I think the [idea] stems from the fact that there are two male groups, two female groups and two co-ed groups, and automatically people think that all of them are going to be butting heads,” she said. “Bursurka is a good opportunity for us to show the campus that the coed groups are here to work together and we’re just here to have fun with each other.”

“There’s always a friendly rivalry,” said Margaret Lindeman ’15 of Ursus Verses, “but I think it more comes from the fact that every group wants to make really good music. So we’re always pushing ourselves to perform better and be as good as we can be, not by putting other groups down, but by doing the best that we can.”

One aspect of the a cappella community that has always been strong is alumni relations, particularly with the Meddies and Longfellows, who hold frequent reunions.

“We have really tight alumni connections,” said Yang. “I know alums from ’06-’07 pretty well even though I never went to school with them, because they visited here sometimes. I’ve been added to the email thread list of recent alumni from 2001 on, and there’s a Facebook group too.”

Although the alumnae networks in the all-female groups may not be quite as established, the leaders say that their alumnae remain an important part of their identity. Over Spring Break, Miscellania did a weeklong tour of New England and New York, where they were able to touch base with several alumnae.

“We’ve done relatively informal reunions in the past, but I think it would be great to do a bigger, official reunion, too,” said Paige Gribb ’14 of Miscellania. “We’ll have our 45th anniversary in 2017, so that will definitely be cause for celebration.”

Above all else, the singers all seem to agree that a cappella has been a defining part of their Bowdoin experience, and many of them hope to continue singing after graduation.

“[A cappella] has helped me with my personal confidence in terms of singing,” said Nangeroni. “It’s honed my leadership skills but also my public speaking skills. After college, I know that I want to keep singing. I don’t know when or where, but I know that I need some sort of outlet, because it’s been a great way to just relieve stress and I enjoy it so much.”

Founded 2001  *  co-ed 

BEHIND THE NAME: Ursus means bear in Latin, and verse is a musical term for a line of words

Founded 1972  *  ALL WOMEN

BEHIND THE NAME: Created the year women were first admitted to Bowdoin; wanted the name to match the Meddiebempsters; looked in a dictionary and chose Miscellania

MUSICAL STYLE: Range of classical choral music and current pop

MOST POPULAR SONGS: Depends on the audience, but currently “Royals” by Lorde

TRADITION OR EVENT THEY’RE ASSOCIATED WITH: ValJam with the Longfellows and Meddielania with the Meddiebempsters

CLAIM TO FAME: They were on Maine Public Broadcasting Network with the Meddiebempsters a couple of years ago.

RECORDINGS: Several CDs are out, most recently Little Black Dress, and another in the works for this year or next 

SIGNATURE PERFORMANCE ATTIRE: Black dresses

IF THEY COULD PERFORM ANY SONG, WHAT WOULD IT BE:  “Scarborough Fair” by Simon and Garfunkel

Founded 2004  *  ALL men

BEHIND THE NAME: Named after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, class of 1825

MUSICAL STYLE: Pop, contemporary a cappella and traditional American choral pieces

MOST POPULAR SONGS: “Hey Juliet” by LMNT

TRADITION OR EVENT THEY’RE ASSOCIATED WITH: ValJam with Miscellania

CLAIM TO FAME: Semi-finals at the International Championships of Collegiate A Cappella 3 years ago; made the Top 30 on the show Sing Off two seasons ago; sang the national anthem at a Celtics games 

RECORDINGS: A new EP is on the way, and they have previously recorded three CDs. 

SIGNATURE PERFORMANCE ATTIRE: Black suits

Founded 1994  *  co-ed

BEHIND THE NAME: It stood for Bowdoin’s Only Co-ed A Cappella, but the Best of College A Cappella CD acronym caused confusion, so the C was changed to a K

MUSICAL STYLE: Pop, with a little bit of indie

MOST POPULAR SONGS: A mashup of  “As Long As You Love Me” by Justin Bieber and “Wide Awake”  by Katy Perry

TRADITION OR EVENT THEY’RE ASSOCIATED WITH: Bursurka with Ursus Versus

CLAIM TO FAME: Low-key concerts for friends in college houses

RECORDINGS: The last CD was recorded 3 years ago, and another one is due this spring

SIGNATURE PERFORMANCE ATTIRE: Jewel tones

IF THEY COULD PERFORM ANY SONG, WHAT WOULD IT BE:  “No Scrubs” by TLC

Founded 2007  *  ALL WOMEN

BEHIND THE NAME: Randy Nichols said that the group was pretty in crime so they decided to incorporate it into the group’s name.

MUSICAL STYLE: Mostly folk with some higher energy music.

MOST POPULAR SONGS: A mashup of “Girl On Fire” by Alicia Keys and “Love the Way You Lie” by Eminem ft. Rihanna

TRADITION OR EVENT THEY’RE ASSOCIATED WITH: PrezJam with the Meddiebempsters

CLAIM TO FAME: They perform in many elderly homes in Brunswick and for the Portland Review.

RECORDINGS: One currently out, with another coming next year.

SIGNATURE PERFORMANCE ATTIRE: Seasonal. They wear sweaters and try to coordinate.

IF THEY COULD PERFORM ANY SONG, WHAT WOULD IT BE: “Elastic Heart” by Sia

Founded 1937  *  ALL men

BEHIND THE NAME: The original story is that someone was blindfolded while throwing darts at a map of Maine, and one dart struck Lake Meddybemps.

MUSICAL STYLE: Founded on barbershop, but they also do jazz arrangements and modern pop songs

MOST POPULAR SONGS: “Mood Indigo” by Duke Ellington and “Goodbye, My Coney Island Baby” by Les Applegate

TRADITION OR EVENT THEY’RE ASSOCIATED WITH: PrezJam with Bellamafia, and their annual tour

CLAIM TO FAME: They’ve sung at the White House, in Korea and in California

RECORDINGS: Decades of CDs, including Christmas with the Meddies

SIGNATURE PERFORMANCE ATTIRE: Khakis, white shirts, blue blazers, and Bowdoin polar bear ties

IF THEY COULD PERFORM ANY SONG, WHAT WOULD IT BE:  “Baby Got Back” by Sir Mix-a-Lot

Regular decision acceptance letters for the Class of 2018 were sent out via email last Friday. Of the 6,048 Regular Decision applicants, 756 were admitted, for an acceptance rate of 12.4 percent. Overall, 1,032 students were admitted for a total acceptance rate of 14.8 percent (including Early Decision applicants.) Last year, the Orient reported a 14.5 percent acceptance rate.

Applications for the Class of 2018 went down 1.6 percent from last year, when there were 7,052 total applicants to the Class of 2017. This year, 6,935 total students applied.

According to Dean of Admissions and Student Aid Scott Meiklejohn, despite the slight decrease in applicants, the Class of 2018 was drawn from “exactly the same pool” as in previous years. 

“Numerically, it was a hundred fewer, but it didn’t make much difference in admitting the class,” he said.

Applications from the South and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States as well as foreign countries increased, while those from New England and the West decreased. Those from the Southwest and Midwest remained roughly the same.

Applications from multicultural students also increased 10 percent, and there was a six percent increase in the number of high schools sending Bowdoin at least one applicant. 

Meiklejohn expressed enthusiasm for the increased number of high schools, saying it demonstrated Bowdoin’s “increasing geographic reach.”

There were 524 women and 508 men admitted, a figure consistent with Bowdoin’s current gender ratio. According to Meiklejohn, the ratio of public to private schools also remained consistent. Currently, 58 percent of Bowdoin students attended public high school; 42 percent went to private school. 

The target size for the Class of 2018 is 495 students, the same as for the Class of 2017, and admitted students must submit their decisions by May 1.

The College raised $46,158,280 in total and had a 59 percent alumni participation rate in Fiscal Year (FY) 2013 (July 1, 2012 to June 30, 2013), according to Senior Vice President for Development and Alumni Relations Rick Ganong ’86. 

Fundraising at the College is broken down into two components, annual giving and capital or planned giving. In FY 2013, $10,591,756 was raised for the annual fund and $35,566,523 was raised for capital projects. Annual giving contributes to the College’s annual budget and is comprised of multiple funds, including the Alumni Fund, the Friends Fund, the Parents Fund, and the Polar Bear Athletic Fund. Capital or planned gifts are used for financial aid, buildings, the endowment and long-term projects. 

In FY 2012, $10,477,227 was raised for the annual fund and $19,706,360 was raised in capital/planned giving, which gave a combined total of $30,183,587. In FY 2011, $9,845,668 was raised for the annual fund and $26,090,320 was raised in capital or planned giving.

“[The annual fund] doesn’t move around that much, we try to grow that every year...and then capital gifts, that’s lumpy. You might take in 15 [million] one year and 35 [million] the next,” Ganong said.

For FY 2014, the annual fund goal has increased to $10,897,000. As of February 24, the College has already raised $5,839,453 in annual funds. 

The annual fund accounts for roughly six percent of the College’s annual operating budget. In FY 2013, 9,654 of the 16,350 alumni in the solicitable alumni base donated to the Alumni Fund or the Polar Bear Athletic Fund, constituting a 59 percent alumni participation rate. The solicitable alumni base does not include all living Bowdoin alumni, as some alumni choose to be put on a “do not solicit” list.

According to Ganong, the alumni participation rate impacts the College’s bond rating, U.S. News and World Report ranking, reputation, brand and annual budget. 

Bond rating agencies use annual giving and alumni participation as factors when determining the College’s ranking, which affects the interest rate at which the College can borrow money. 

Ganong also spoke to the impact of alumni participation’s on rankings. 

“Like it or not, a lot of people look at those ratings and those are important to us,” Ganong said. 

In FY 2012, the alumni participation rate was 58 percent and in FY 2011 it was 56 percent. The goal for FY 2014 is a 60 percent alumni participation rate, or roughly 10,000 alumni donors, according to Director of Annual Giving Brannon Fisher. 

“Because the graduating classes are so large now, what really moves the needle, believe it or not, will be this year’s graduating class,” Ganong said. “Unless you had a really, really bad time at Bowdoin, there’s no way that you can’t send ten dollars. That’s like a six-pack, or a really nice trip to Gelato Fiasco. So we’re really hoping our graduating seniors had a great four years, they’re going out into the world with very fond thoughts of Bowdoin, and they want to contribute to our alumni fund.”

The role of alumni

The Office of Development and Alumni Relations (DAR) has two components. Alumni Relations employees plan, set up and run all alumni and fundraising events, including reunions and events at Bowdoin Clubs around the country. Development consists of officers who solicit gifts from donors, and in total, about 55 people work in DAR.

“It’s really kind of a neat process to see occur,” Ganong said. “We’ll hold an event, we’ll solicit and we’ll thank. Those are the three engines that are running here.”

DAR also collaborates with other groups, including the Office of Communications and Public Affairs and the student phone-a-thon callers. 

“We’d like to think that we don’t have to employ student callers. … We would love to be able to inspire our alumni base and parent base to wake up on July 1 and send a check to Bowdoin College—that doesn’t happen,” Ganong said.

Recently, the Office of Communications and Public Affairs has increasingly used social media to communicate with potential donors.

“That’s really part of this whole giving process, just cultivation and awareness, keeping people informed about Bowdoin,” Ganong said. “If you look at a duck, swimming on the water it looks really smooth, but underneath there’s the feet doing crazy things. It’s a little bit like Bowdoin DAR, it looks really smooth on the surface but there’s a lot going on underneath.”

Capital campaign

Bowdoin’s most recent capital campaign, “The Bowdoin Campaign,” surpassed its $250 million goal between 2004 and 2009, by raising a total of $293 million, the largest capital campaign in the College’s history. The capital campaign before that raised $136 million from 1993 to 1998.

“If we want to continue to compete with [Williams and Amherst]...we need to keep our financials healthy,” Ganong said. “So I think a capital campaign is something that would certainly help to do that and we need to think about that and we are.”

Last fall, Amherst celebrated its successful $502 million “Lives of Consequence” capital campaign. Williams raised $500 million from 2003 to 2008 during its most recent capital campaign. In 2010, Colby completed Maine’s largest capital campaign ever, raising $376 million in five years.

“The quick answer is yes, we’re thinking about it, we’re talking about it. Do we have a timeframe and a goal? No,” Ganong said. “We’re going to be spending a lot of time in the next several months thinking about another capital campaign.”

In 1826, John Brown Russwurm became the first African American to graduate from Bowdoin College. Nearly 200 years later, the House named in his memory is a thriving center for academic, social and cultural events on campus. 

The son of an English merchant and an unknown black slave, Russwurm was born in 1799 in Jamaica. He and his father moved to Portland, Maine in 1812, where he attended Hebron Academy. In 1824, with the support of his stepmother and her second husband, Russwurm enrolled at Bowdoin. 

After graduation, he led an illustrious career as an abolitionist, serving as editor of “Freedom’s Journal” (the first newspaper owned and operated by African Americans) in New York for several years before emigrating to Liberia in 1829, following his controversial support of African American colonization of Africa. He served as editor of “The Liberia Herald” for several years and became governor of the Maryland section of the colony in 1836, holding this post until his death in 1851.

Coles Tower is getting a long overdue makeover. This summer, the College will spend $2.8 million to renovate the building, which turns 50 this year. Four floors will be renovated each year for the next four years. The completed project will cost approximately $5 million, according to Katy Longley, the senior vice president for finance and administration and the college treasurer. The College will partner with Harriman, an engineering firm in Auburn and Massachusetts-based Consigli Construction Company, which has an office in Portland. Consigli worked with the College in 2007on the Art Museum and in 2004 on the Chapel.

Video courtesy of Chris Cameron '15.

“We see them in our sleep.”  

This is how Ben Smith, Coach of the 1998 U.S. women’s hockey team, described the team’s Canadian rivals in an interview with the New York Times leading up to their Olympic matchup. 

It’s fair to guess that some Bowdoin hockey players may spend tonight similarly fixated on an opponent from the North, though the rival in question is Colby, not Canada. Today the Polar Bears will defend the first of last year’s decisive victories over the Mules. The rivalry between the two teams is a classic grudge match, and this year’s games continue a long and storied tradition. 

The College’s 96 percent approval rating remained unchanged from the fall, according to the latest installment of the Orient’s semi-annual survey.

Approval of the Office of Student Affairs has reached a three-year low of 76 percent. In May 2011, approval was 87 percent and in May 2012 it was 83 percent.

​“The NAS report has done nothing but strengthen my positive opinion of Bowdoin,” said a sophomore male in response to the survey. “Sure, the school is not perfect, but no one expects it to be.”

Less than three months after the project began, electrical and mechanical work is beginning on the new Longfellow Arts Building. On schedule to be completed by August 2013, the project is will transform the old Longfellow Elementary School into a new hub for art studios, offices and gallery space. The building is currently 38,000 square feet but will be expanded to 44,000 square feet and will include a digital media lab, a woodshop, a printmaking studio, a dance studio, gallery spaces, faculty offices and studio space for drawing, painting, sculpture and other visual arts classes.

When the Amtrak Downeaster rolled into Brunswick Station yesterday afternoon, its arrival marked the first time in 53 years that a passenger train arrived in Brunswick. The catalyst for the expansion of Amtrak service to Brunswick was a $38.3 million grant from the Federal Railroad Administration, part of the $8 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.