Isa Cruz

Last Friday, community members gathered on the second floor of the Hawthorne-Longfellow Library to celebrate the opening of the fall 2025 exhibit, “From Club to Cause: Student Groups and the Politics of Voice at Bowdoin.”

The exhibit, a compilation of fliers, posters, student publications and other materials from the College archives, explores the ways that students have historically engaged in activism and worked to create a more inclusive Bowdoin.

The show was curated by Becca Silva ’26, with contributions from Dakota Wilson ’27, in collaboration with Special Collections Education and Engagement Librarian Marieke Van Der Steenhoven.

“The general topic is about power structures at Bowdoin and how students have used different outlets on campus to not only question these power structures, but use them, or work with them, or work against them, to make the campus that they see fit. A lot of that had to do with diversity and belonging,” Silva said.

Van Der Steenhoven decided to curate the exhibition last year after noticing gaps and absences in the representation of student groups and organizations in the College’s archives.

“This was both an opportunity to highlight what we do have and to get folks hopefully thinking about where and what they might want in the archives to represent the work they’ve done on campus,” Van Der Steenhoven said.

Wilson, who had worked in Bowdoin’s Special Collections and Archives for two years, was eager to join the project when Van Der Steenhoven approached her with the idea.

The display case that Wilson curated focuses on Bowdoin student engagement in community service and volunteering. One example included Project ’65, a Civil Rights era effort to increase the enrollment of Black students at the College.

“My overarching goal for my part of the exhibit was to explore how Bowdoin students engaged with the Common Good over time—what did practicing the Common Good look like in the 1800s [versus] today?” Wilson wrote in an email to the Orient.

Silva joined the project in the spring after finding inspiration in two documents written by Bowdoin’s Latin American Student Organization (LASO) in the 1990s while looking through archival materials with her class.

“They were both talking about diversity at the College and calling out Bowdoin for not having diverse faculty,” Silva said. “And so I was like, ‘Is there more of this? Is there any way I can read about it?’”

Other materials, including individual essays and student publications, show student reactions to issues from the later part of the 20th century like affirmative action, student apathy, hate speech on campus and the College’s financial ties to South African oppression.

For Silva, the most challenging part of curating the exhibit wasn’t the overwhelming amount of material; it was having to work within the boundaries of a limited physical space after connecting deeply with all the material.

“I wanted to encompass nuance, and I didn’t really want to tell a singular story, but I am a singular person,” Silva said.

Silva said that the exhibition also reveals patterns of recurring history, as many issues that were important decades ago are still relevant today.

“It reminds me that students have been fighting for the same things for at least the past 30 years, and, in a way, that’s really frustrating but at the same time very comforting,” Silva said. “[The next step is] reckoning with that and not allowing yourself to become stagnant in that realization and actually using that to mobilize yourself.” Van Der Steenhoven echoed these sentiments.

“Students have been really persistent on certain issues, especially around diversity over the years,” Van Der Steenhoven said. “What I find so fascinating about this exhibit is the way that you can see what’s happening in the rest of the world permeating the Bowdoin bubble and the way that students are responding to external events.”

Wilson hopes the exhibit will remind students that getting involved on campus is an important way to make an impact.

“It’s so easy for us students to get wrapped up in our academics and our jobs and what we need to accomplish moment to moment that we forget to look out to the world and try to think about the ways that we can best use our time and privilege to help others,” she wrote.