The Bowdoin Orient

The cohort of faculty tenured this year will be the first group eligible to take advantage of the College's new sabbatical policy, which the Board of Trustees voted to approve on April 6, 2010.

As the results of Fulbright Program winners continue to roll in, it appears to be another good year for Bowdoin applicants.

A misprint on the Ivies bottles sold by the Class of 2011 council is causing controversy and confusion on campus.

With Ivies this weekend and discussions of responsible drinking abound, alcohol remains a hot topic. Members of the Alcohol team (A-Team) gathered for a summit last Friday to discuss the ways Bowdoin students view, use and abuse alcohol.

Colby students have taken their last shots—with the college's approval, that is. On April 20, Colby joined the growing list of institutions that have banned hard alcohol from their campuses. Colby's hard alcohol ban was instigated due to its high number of alcohol transports.

Times have changed since January 2009 when the Blue Tarp Committee anticipated a zero percent rate of return on the endowment, suggested increasing the incoming class size to bring in revenue and advocated that the College not lay off any employees. According to President Barry Mills, the College expects a seven percent rate of return on the endowment, did not admit additional students to the Class of 2013 and has laid off four employees.

Some first years may be in close contact with professors well before classes start this fall. A proposal for a new pre-major advisory program, introduced by Dean of First Year Students Janet Lohmann and Associate Professor of Psychology Suzanne Lovett, is designed to focus on students who need more academic attention during their first year at Bowdoin than has been directly provided in the past.

Last week, the Orient reported on an incident at 10 Cleaveland Street that occurred early in the morning on Sunday, April 18. The article stated that police arrived in the aftermath of an altercation involving at least one Bowdoin student and a knife. According to Vice President for Communications and Public Affairs Scott Hood, the student in question is no longer enrolled at the College, though there were no details, allegations, or attributions of blame provided. Despite further requests for information to report a follow-up on the event, however, no new information about the incident has been released.

A few weeks ago, an editorial appeared in the Orient proposing that classes be canceled this Friday for the sake of allowing more students to enjoy the Friday of Ivies. The editors cite actions at Williams and Smith Colleges where Friday classes are annually canceled for the tradition of "Mountain Day."

It's old news that the Student Activities Funding Committee (SAFC) is hurting for money: The WBOR concert has been canceled for somewhat dubious reasons and clubs on the whole are having their budgets slashed. Clubs are responding by inflating requests for funding, creating a vicious cycle that will only result in the poor allocation of money. And yet, the Entertainment Board (E-Board) is still bringing three acts to Ivies. Granted, it's too late for any of this to be changed, but clubs have been hurting for funds since before the beginning of the year. Considering the huge wellspring of musical talent at Bowdoin, it seems ridiculous that we should use so much money to bring in three artists when we could make use of local talent, thus saving money and building interest in local bands.

How can we guarantee freedom for the hardworking, English-only-speaking American descendants of immigrants in an age of foreign-born, Muslim presidents and the threat of terrorism? Why, enact immigration reform that demands racial profiling, of course. The real threat to American security is, naturally, illegal immigrants. Thanks, Arizona, for showing the rest of us how it's done!

I am counting down the days before I can embrace my sisters again, speak Arabic to my compatriots, wear what my bearded, funny neighbor calls conventional clothes, and reassure my family that neither America nor Broadwain—a Moroccan rendering of Bowdoin with touches of the renowned Broadway—is hostile to Arabs. I have come to realize how unready I am for the last of this limitless list of matters, which I will be compelled to address back home. I do not wish to posit a basis for confrontation—American media coverage attends to that daily and impeccably. Rather, I would like to speak my mind with regards to the questions of identity at the crossroads of culture and religion, especially Islam, at Bowdoin.

I heard the rumors while abroad: "The police are out of control," "Bowdoin is different," "Weekends aren't fun anymore," and "The party scene is gone." I refused to believe these outlandish claims when I heard them through my computer screen via a Skype call, or read them during a Facebook chat or in an e-mail.

Over the years the students of Bowdoin College have come to pride themselves for testing the boundaries of free speech and artistic expression. We entertain radical ideas and interact with some fairly radical intellectuals.

On the eve of Ivies, I have decided to voice some thoughts. I want to first congratulate the administration for doing their best, as always, to watch over us na‹ve students while we revel in the magic that is Ivies Weekend. Nonetheless, the administration, as a formal body can only go so far—their earnest pleas for us to be good lack oomph. Here are some things that I feel need to be stated.

Sometimes, plans change. Whether we are College administrators or college students, we are all forced to reevaluate our seemingly stable plans for better options.

By 2020, Bowdoin may have achieved carbon neutrality on campus, constructed a new social sciences building at the site of the former Dayton Arena, developed land acquired from the Brunswick Naval Air Station (NASB), and initiated a new capital campaign. While administrators are optimistic about plans and changes to come, they emphasized that in many respects, concrete plans for the future remain uncertain.

While students get plenty of face time with their professors during lectures, they rarely see the scholarly work their instructors do outside the classroom. According to the College's website, "Faculty members are also expected to be involved in their field outside the College, making scholarly, artistic or other contributions which are recognized by the larger professional community."

Every year, nearly 6,000 students apply to Bowdoin College. Of the one-sixth accepted, nearly half chooses to matriculate. And every year, the Office of Admissions strives for a "diverse" graduating class. Diversity, however, is not a sugar-coated word for racial and ethnic minorities. "We don't have minority recruitment," said Associate Dean of Admissions and Coordinator of Multicultural Recruitment Elmer Moore. "But multicultural and diversity recruitment." Moore defined diversity as "people from various perspectives such as geography, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, political ideology, religion, height and so on." According to Moore, efforts to bring "diverse" students to the College began in 1794, when it was founded.

"We decided that the Temple must be utterly destroyed, ruined beyond redemption, so we would blow it up." These words, which some might attribute to a deranged madman, are actually those of a former Bowdoin student. An anonymous note, which appeared in the Bowdoin Alumnus magazine of 1928, described one of the more notable incidents in the long history of pranks at the College: the leveling of the campus outhouse, known as the "Temple" in 1875. With the sense of revelry, and accompanying debauchery, that arrives with Ivies Weekend, this seems a particularly apt moment to revisit the often overlooked, but decidedly lengthy, history of pranks at the College.

After an unprecedentedly busy fall, the Counseling Center has seen some order restored. Emergencies, hospitalizations and counseling sessions have dwindled, despite the spring semester's reputation for higher Counseling Center traffic. In a November 6 article, the Orient reported that the volume of counseling sessions was up, the number of emergencies was high, and there had been more hospitalizations at that point in the year than ever before.

In April, dandelions sprout yellow splashes of color on fresh green carpets. I don't see them as pesky wild weeds that ruin a manicured lawn; instead, they are sunbursts on a rainy day. I can see how dandelions might rub some people the wrong way. Pick a dandelion and your hand gets covered in a milky white sap that taints everything you touch for the rest of the day with a bitter flavor. The yellow spots on your jeans? Dandelion stains from your last picnic. And, that flower garden that you labored over to plant will look more like a happenstance scattering of wild flowers when dandelions come to call. Some people suggest eliminating dandelions by hand-pulling them and yanking out the taproots (depending on the soil, taproots can extend up to 15-feet deep—so it might take more than a pluck). Rather than spending time fretting over the helpless weeds, however, we should be celebrating them. There are many uses for them including dandelion wine, dandelion coffee, and best of all, dandelion-crowns.

The start of the decade found the College in a strong financial position, the Orient reported in November of 2000, with an improved bond rating to borrow money with greater ease and nine consecutive years of balanced budgets. The College was not immune, however, to the economic hardships that followed September 11, 2001, which included a depressed stock market and widespread economic slowdown. Then-Treasurer of the College Kent Chabotar told the Orient that the College had been preparing for times of economic uncertainty for about two years. "We're not battening down the hatches or heading for the basement. We're just being prudent," he said in a September 2001 article.

After a week of sexy consent stories, sexy e-mails, sexy sunglasses and even a sex etiquette dinner, I thought it was only appropriate to keep this sexy discussion rolling. So what about consent. What's it like at Bowdoin? Why does it matter? And most importantly, is it really that sexy? As with many students on this campus, I feel pretty knowledgeable about issues regarding sexual consent, particularly on a college campus. That said, I still but wanted to hear it from the perspective of some of Bowdoin's most widely-known sex educators, our very own Shana Natelson '10 and Brian Fry '10.

While many of us may just pass by old, deteriorating buildings, for three students in Adjunct Lecturer Wiebke Theodore's independent study it is just this style of aging architecture that is the focus of their semester-long study.

It is finally that time of year that all Bowdoin students have been waiting for: Ivies Weekend. This year's Spring Concert on Iview Weekend features four popular and diverse groups: campus band Eleven, Passoon Pit, Reel Big Fish and The Cool Kids.

Brunswick's Eleven Pleasant Street Gallery will exhibit Frank Valliere's show, "Classic Ruin: A Retrospective of Frank Valliere" from May 1 to 31.

Three years after graduating from Bowdoin, visual arts major Shaun El C. Leonardo '03 had an artistic experience that made "[art] grad school look like kid stuff."

I was in the movie theater recently, and in a moment of too little or too much drama, turned my eye to the screen itself; and so started thinking about rectangles

With a runner on third, a one-run lead and only one out, the softball team was in trouble. But that's when sophomore centerfielder Hillary Smyth took things into her own hands—a fly ball was hit to Smith and she fired a strike to the plate, gunning the runner and ending the game.

With the score tied at 12 in triple overtime, a goal by Carolyn Gorajek '13 won the women's lacrosse game for Bowdoin and snapped Williams's six-game win streak (see Athlete of the Week, page 18).

The men's track season is reaching a highly competitive point, as competition shifts toward individual performances. However, the team has some strong performances to build on as a result of its performance last weekend.

After miserable conditions the previous week at the Aloha Relays, the women's track team excelled in more favorable conditions at the NESCAC Championships, held at Tufts University last Saturday.

Coming off the toughest defeat of the year against Middlebury, the men's tennis team faced University of Southern Maine and NESCAC rival Williams (7-4 overall, 4-1 NESCAC) last weekend. Bowdoin prevailed without losing a match, trouncing USM.

In the world of college sailing, the month of April signals an intense consecutive weekend series of New England championship regattas.