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Number of articles: 50
First Article: March 3, 2017
Latest Article: May 1, 2020
Members of the Student Organization Oversight Committee (SOOC) are charging that College administrators took unilateral action against the Bowdoin Labor Alliance (BLA) for hosting a mutual aid fund on its website, pushing back against administrators’ account of the committee’s role in persuading organizers to shut down the fund.
Members of the Bowdoin Labor Alliance (BLA) shut down their online mutual aid fund on Tuesday after College administrators notified them that the effort violated College policies that prohibit independent student fundraising. Before closing on Tuesday, the fund had raised and distributed over $15,000 to Bowdoin students, staff and other community members struggling with the economic fallout of the coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis since April 1.
As of March 30, Bowdoin has lost $6.8 million due to expenses related to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the transition to remote learning, according to senior administrators. Most of the sum—$6.2 million—comes from room and board refunds issued to students, and the remaining $600,000 of expenses came from the costs associated with conducting classes online and moving students out of campus housing.
Head Football Coach B.J. Hammer has been named as a defendant in a federal sexual harrassment lawsuit filed by a former player at Allegheny College alleging that the school ignored reports of sexual misconduct and discrimination.
The College has placed a freeze on all new hires as it turns its attention to reexamining the budget in the midst of the financial crisis caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, President Clayton Rose announced in an email on March 27.
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to roil global financial markets, colleges and universities around the United States are entering uncharted economic waters. In Brunswick, Bowdoin is battening down the hatches. “It is really too soon to know how severe the impact will be or how this compares with economic challenges of the past, but there is no question that this is a very difficult environment for investments,” wrote Matt Orlando, the senior vice president for finance and administration and treasurer of the College, in an email to the Orient.
Elizabeth McCormack, the dean for academic affairs and senior vice president of the College, will be stepping down from her position at the end of the academic year, President Clayton Rose announced in an email to campus Tuesday.
President Clayton Rose joined a small group of students in the living room of Reed House for an intimate question-and-answer session on Thursday evening. During nearly two hours of discussion, students pressed Rose on an array of hot-button campus issues, ranging from James “Jes” Staley’s ’79 P’11 status on the Board of Trustees to campus mental health services and the fight for a living wage for Bowdoin’s housekeeping staff.
An equipment failure near the Androscoggin hydroelectric plant caused a power outage that left roughly 2,500 customers in Brunswick and parts of Bowdoin’s north campus in the dark last Saturday morning. The outage occurred when a heedless squirrel damaged circuit equipment near Sea Dog Brewing in Topsham, according to Manager of Corporate Communications for Central Maine Power (CMP) Catharine Hartnett.
David Roux P ’14, a member of Bowdoin Board of Trustees, has donated $100 million to Northeastern University to build a technology-focused graduate school and research center in Portland. The center, which will be called the Roux Institute, is slated to open this fall in a temporary location.
Ah, the Bowdoin-Colby Hockey Game, the enduring symbol of everything that is great about our fine institution: Polar Bear spirit, old-timey sportsmanship, a creative excuse to get drunk before dinner. The liberal arts at their finest.
It didn’t take long for the audience in a packed Pickard Theater to give Michelle Alexander a standing ovation. As soon as she walked on stage, everyone stood up. Alexander, a renowned legal scholar, New York Times columnist and author of the best-selling book “The New Jim Crow,” visited Bowdoin on Thursday to participate in a moderated discussion, entitled “Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” this year’s annual Martin Luther King Jr.
Jill Lepore H’15 is worried about the nation, and she thinks that you should be too. “It has often been said, in the 21st century and in earlier centuries, too, that Americans lack a shared past and that, built on cracked foundations, the Republic is crumbling,” writes Lepore in the introduction to “These Truths,” her 930-page single-volume history of the United States, published in September 2018.
The Bowdoin football season ended much like it began: badly. After carrying a 14-point lead into the fourth quarter against Colby, the Polar Bears allowed 27-unanswered points in the final period, falling 47-34 to cap off the team’s third winless season in four years.
The following interactive visuals represent data from the Bowdoin fall athletics season. Data was compiled from the NESCAC and Bowdoin Athletics. The varsity teams represented below in the “record” categories are men’s and women’s soccer, football, volleyball, field hockey and women’s rugby.
Imagine that your car won’t start, so you open the hood, take a peek around and decide that the battery is dead. You grab your jumper pack, fire it up, but still, the ignition won’t turn over.
During a faculty meeting on Monday, President Clayton Rose denied that any organization or group external to the College participated in the appointment of former American Enterprise Institute (AEI) president Arthur Brooks as the inaugural Joseph McKeen Visiting Fellow.
The faculty will consider a motion at next Monday’s faculty meeting that would require President Clayton Rose to produce a written account of the process that led to Arthur Brooks’ appointment as the inaugural Joseph McKeen Visiting Fellow.
Nate Richam-Odoi ’20 was a latecomer to football. Instead of putting on a helmet at age six, he had to wait until he turned seven. Chalk it up to the rules. In Richam-Odoi’s hometown of West Hartford, Connecticut, the local pee-wee football league mandated that players be either seven years old or in the third grade before they padded up.
Bowdoin football suffered its first shutout loss of the season on Saturday, falling to Tufts (3-3) 49-0 in Medford, Massachusetts. The Polar Bears drop to 0-6 with the loss and are tied with Bates (0-6) and Colby (0-6) for last place in the NESCAC.
Bowdoin football has had a historically bad start to its season. Not just a bad start—a historically bad start. And history has not been kind to Bowdoin football. So get out your record book and some Wite-Out, because it’s time for an update.
Bowdoin women’s volleyball (6-6, NESCAC 1-2) entered last Saturday’s matchup against national number-five ranked Johnson and Wales (11-3) having lost four of their last five games—including two straight-set losses to conference rivals Wesleyan (10-2) and Tufts (12-0)—and with three times as many losses in the past month as it had accumulated across all of last season.
Bowdoin football (0-2, 0-2 NESCAC) suffered one of the most lopsided losses in program history on Saturday, falling to Trinity (1-1, NESCAC 1-1) 61-7. The 54-point margin of defeat is the third largest in the team’s history during the modern record era, which began in 1921.
Bowdoin football’s season-opening loss to Hamilton was a game of almosts. The offense almost clicked. The defense almost kept the game within reach. The Polar Bears almost came out on top. But almost is still almost, and the Polar Bears still fell, 37-24, in their first game under the direction of head coach BJ Hammer and his staff.
Bowdoin volleyball began its season last weekend with a hiccup, dropping two of three matches at the Wesleyan Invitational. The team opened its home schedule on Tuesday, beating the University of Southern Maine three sets to one to bring its record even at 2-2.
Unlike most seniors, Carolyn Brady ’19 had the opportunity to walk across two stages this summer: the first, in May, to collect her Bowdoin diploma, and the second, on June 22, to collect her sash and crown as Miss Maine 2019 at the Freeport Arts Center.
Football has returned to Brunswick, and that means only one thing. It’s Hammer Time. Let’s all get up to speed. After using the first three quarters of last season to extend its losing streak to a record-setting 24 games, J.B.
Anyone who follows Bowdoin football’s social media account has probably asked some variation of this question in the past few months. Even a cursory glance over the team’s Instagram page makes it clear that the Polar Bears’ new coaching staff, led by Head Coach B.J.
Imagine walking into a bookstore and seeing a bookshelf labeled “Asian History” that includes volumes on Chinese history alongside volumes on Asian-American history. Now imagine a bookshelf labeled “African History” that includes volumes on the history of Nigeria alongside volumes on African Americans in the United States.
As students spread around the globe for spring break, community members were confronted with news of the latest act of racially-charged terrorism to make international headlines: the murder of 50 Muslims by a fanatical white supremacist in the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Perfect is the enemy of good. Or, in the case of Bowdoin women’s basketball, of exceptional. It’s difficult to look back on a 31-2 season and feel somehow disappointed. But it’s not impossible. In a sense, we, the fans, are spoiled.
Six hundred ninety-eight miles from Brunswick, the women’s basketball team is making a home for itself on one of the nation’s largest stages. For the second consecutive year, Bowdoin advanced to the NCAA Division III championship game on Friday evening after finishing off the St.
Strange things happen when you’re very high up. You lose perspective. Things get a little blurry. Vertigo sets in. And if this past week of women’s basketball has been one thing, it has been vertiginous. After walking all over Middlebury in Saturday’s semifinal, the Polar Bears suffered their first loss of the season, falling to third-ranked Tufts, 69–75, in the finals of the NESCAC tournament on Sunday.
Women’s basketball suffered its first loss of the season on Sunday, falling to the Tufts Jumbos 69–75 in the finals of the NESCAC tournament. Tufts, coming off a last-minute upset of second-ranked Amherst in yesterday afternoon’s semifinal, claimed its third NESACAC title in program history, its second since 2015, and secured an automatic berth to the NCAA tournament.
The top-seeded women’s basketball team (26-0, 11-0 NESCAC) finished off fifth-seeded Middlebury (16-7, 5-6 NESCAC) in the semifinals of the NESCAC tournament on Saturday afternoon to advance to tomorrow’s final game. The Polar Bears have not advanced to the NESCAC final since 2015, when they fell to Tufts, and have not won the tournament since 2009, Head Coach Adrienne Shibles’s first year at the program.
Textbook. Flawless. Ideal. Unrivaled. Masterly. Exemplary. Superlative. Pick your adjective. But one descriptor will attach itself to Bowdoin women’s basketball regular season regardless of what thesaurus you pick up: perfect. The final weekend of the women’s basketball season was a one-two-punch that dispelled any doubt—if there was any still hanging around—about the Polar Bears’ on-court dominance.
For Bowdoin women’s basketball (20-0, NESCAC 6-0), the story of Saturday’s 65-56 victory over the Amherst Mammoths (17-2, NESCAC 4-1) began 315 days earlier in Rochester, Minnesota. It was there, in the Mayo Civic Center, that the undefeated Mammoths finished off the Polar Bears, 65-45, to earn their second consecutive Division III National Championship title.
With his introduction as the 30th head coach of Bowdoin football (1-8), B.J. Hammer finds himself in a familiar spot: a hole. For the second time in four years, Hammer, a native of Carmel, Indiana, is taking over a struggling football program.
J.B. Wells will not return as head coach of the football team, the College announced in a November 15 press release. Wells, who led the Polar Bears to a 1-8 record in his fourth season as head coach, will finish his career with an overall record of 3-31, having led the team through the longest losing streak in program history of 24 games between November of 2015 and November of 2018.
All animals are sad after intercourse, the old saying goes. And following their climactic victory over Bates, one got the sense that the Polar Bears were, too. The day after victory is a sadly neglected moment in history: what did David do the day after bringing down Goliath?
This is the story of the best football game in Bowdoin history. November 9, 1963: For nearly 70 years, the Polar Bears had faced off against their archrival, the University of Maine Black Bears, in the culminating game of the season.
On the door to Coach J.B. Wells’ office is a poster emblazoned with the likeness of quarterback phenom Peyton Manning and the following quotation: “I wouldn’t have a single touchdown without someone to catch it, and someone to block for it, and someone to create the play, and someone to call it, and someone to celebrate it with.” Still mired in a 23-game losing streak, the longest in the program’s history, the Polar Bears have learned the truth of Manning’s wisdom in a literal way.
From the Hubbard Grandstand, the wooden frame of what will become Bowdoin football’s new locker room and training facility is just visible over the visiting team stands. It has no roof, no walls, no siding. Just a wooden frame.
I’ve been accumulating a list of pithy yet uplifting one-liners to open the story about Bowdoin football’s first victory in three years. “Gameday in Brunswick began with the campus enshrouded in a thick, gloomy mist. By game time, the fog had burned off to reveal a breathtaking September day.” Just imagine the possibilities.
When I arrived at Whittier Field 15 minutes before the start of practice, the place was vacant—or so I thought. While I was sitting in the Hubbard Grandstand, enjoying the fruits of the $8 million dollar renovation, a voice called up to me from the field.
August, says Head Football Coach J.B. Wells, is a great time to be a football coach—anywhere. “Has any team in America had a bad offseason? No. At this point in the season, every team in America is undefeated,” said Wells.
It is no secret that the humanities are fighting to survive in the 21st century. Seeking to justify their existence to federal or state financiers, college presidents and skeptical parents, defenders of the humanities are producing page upon page, book upon book seeking to explain why they do what they do.
Now that spring has arrived in Brunswick, and it is tolerable, even pleasant, to be outdoors for more than a few minutes, I find it increasingly difficult to stay holed up in a library. Whereas the library provides a warm haven from the colder and darker Maine months, now the shining sun makes those same cubicles feel more like cells.
Last Friday, I attended a “speed networking” event hosted by the Bowdoin Career Planning Center. Clad in our finest business-casual attire, 30 or so of my peers and I schmoozed with successful Bowdoin alumni for a couple of hours, rehearsing our small-talk skills and learning how to pitch ourselves to potential employers.
Unless you’re a hermit or a Floridian, you know that Brunswick was unseasonably warm last week. The mid-February heatwave made for some confused seasonal activities. I, for one, have never had to circumnavigate mounds of snow in 50-degree weather.
