Henry Abbott

On December 1, 2022, I received the news that I had been matched with Bowdoin on a full-ride scholarship through QuestBridge. As soon as I was let out of my last class of the day, I ran to my car, propped up my phone, hit record and opened my laptop. But I was never able to post that video—I had pronounced Bowdoin wrong throughout the entire thing. All of this is to say that, in many ways, Bowdoin was still unfamiliar to me at that time.

When I told the news to my friends and family, they were all very proud—after, of course, a minute of Google searching to figure out what Bowdoin actually was. My parents bragged on their Facebook pages, saying, “Look at my daughter, going to a school with a 9 percent acceptance rate.” And I, too, felt very proud of myself, not just for Bowdoin’s prestige but for what I believed the College stood for: my chance, I thought, to escape the bigotry of the South had come.

In May of last year, when pro-Palestine protests were springing up on college campuses across the country, something happened at the University of Mississippi, the top college in my home state. Videos were circulating online of a protest gone wrong, confrontations between a small group of pro-Palestinian protesters and a larger group of counter-protesters. The white male counter-protesters shouted racist remarks, chanted “We want Trump,” made racist gestures and specifically taunted one Black woman in the crowd of pro-Palestinian protesters.

When I saw these clips on social media, I felt reaffirmed in my decision to leave the South and come to Bowdoin. I was almost able to convince myself that I had escaped. But in the wake of the encampment held by SJP, it has become increasingly clear to me that Bowdoin is no better than any other institution that willfully accepts genocide. Bigotry exists at Bowdoin just as it does in Mississippi, but here, rather than being thrown in your face, it is hidden beneath flowery words, manipulation and inaction.

Bowdoin capitalizes off of its history of student activism in order to lure in prospective students, but in actuality, it suppresses the voices of protesters. Not only that, Bowdoin actively works to create lines of division amongst its population and shift the blame from itself to its students, punishing them unjustly.

President Safa Zaki claimed in her email to the student body and faculty that the encampment “disrupted campus life,” leaving members of the community feeling “unwelcome, intimidated and unsafe.” But if you had attended the protests held outside the front doors to Smith Union, you would have heard music, laughter and impassioned chanting for the true common good. If you had walked through Smith Union on the Thursday night before administration closed and locked the doors, you would have seen much of the same thing.

I find it difficult now to come to terms with these two very different ideas of Bowdoin I house within my mind. One is the institution that gave me an opportunity I had never dreamt possible. The other is the institution that continues to support genocide and threaten students who dare to question that decision. Still, I believe that Bowdoin has the capacity to change. I chose this school because its messaging spoke to me; I felt like I could belong here. I know there are so many other students in the same situation as myself, grappling over their conflicting feelings towards this school.

The truth is that in twenty or thirty years Bowdoin will look back on these protests and use them to its advantage, to brag about its history and to bolster its reputation. I can only hope that by that point, something will have changed and that Bowdoin can someday become not just an “elite” institution but a brave and introspective one. As we all grapple with drastic, uncomfortable and painful changes in our lives as a result of an increasingly divisive society, I imagine that Bowdoin will have plenty of chances to prove herself, and I hope that she does.