Secretary of the College Richard "Mers" Mersereau '69 has been at Bowdoin for a long time. Starting as a student and continuing as an administrator, career counselor, and coach, he has been here, with the exception of four months in the military and a year at graduate school at Wesleyan, for more than 40 years.
Mers, the nickname he goes by, has seen enormous change during his time at Bowdoin. He has seen the College's recent history and, almost always behind the scenes, has had a hand in shaping the institution Bowdoin is today?and the place Bowdoin will be tomorrow.
This two-part profile of Mers will follow his career at the College?from an assistant director of admissions to assistant director of the senior center to director of summer programs to director of communications to an executive assistant to the president to his current position as secretary of the College?and, in doing so, take an in-depth look Bowdoin since 1965.
"In some ways, Mers is the glue of the Bowdoin community," President Barry Mills said. "I think trustees see him in that way, and alumni view him in that way as well."
As secretary of the College, Mers works with the Board of Trustees, helping to keep board members up to date about issues on-campus and providing training to new trustees. Mers also serves on various committees, helps in planning significant events, and does any number of other tasks to help keep the College running smoothly.
"He is a genuinely committed in all the right ways to Bowdoin," Mills said.
Mers has an index card, beat up and yellowed with time, tacked to the bulletin board in his office. On it is a quote, typewritten, by Martin Luther King Jr. about "the fierce urgency of now." At the top of the card in handwritten capitals is the word "now" in blue marker. In the quote, each repetition of the word "now" is underlined in faded pencil. The phrase "now is the time..." repeats again and again. When I asked him where the card was from, he appeared momentarily flummoxed, as if he had forgotten the card was even on his wall.
He had typed it up while at Wesleyan. While there, he had taken a black history course and become interested in civil rights
With stacks of paper on his table and desk, and boxes scattered on the floor, Mersereau's office seems smaller than it actually is. Located on the third floor of the prestigious-looking building at 85 Federal St.?which served as the president's house for 92 years?Mersereau's office is organized, but in Mers's quirky version of organization. He told me that when he was writing his honors thesis in government about Tanzania, he would write all his ideas out on a page and then outline them by circling the most important ones. He speaks in a similar manner, talking about a few different things and then circling back to the most important topics, elaborating on them with an extended anecdote or deeper explanation.
After graduation, Mersereau worked in the admissions office for six months with Dick Moll, who was Bowdoin's dean of admissions from 1967 to 1975. He left for the Army Reserve, which, as he explained it, "you joined back then to prevent yourself from going to Vietnam." After four months in uniform, he went to Wesleyan and got a master's in education. He was planning on teaching African studies at the high school level?he had become interested in the civil rights movement while at Bowdoin?but got a call from Moll asking him to come back to admissions. "Moll was transforming Bowdoin," Mersereau explained. "And that was something that resonated with me."
"I was trying to find appropriate 'poster boy' recent graduates," Moll explained. "Mers came to the admissions office to work just as we were on the cusp of coeducation. There is a certain kind of personality that fits college admissions and Mers has it," Moll said.
"He has an infectious smile, a generous spirit, and, well, I can't imagine there is anyone out there who does not like Mers. He is very engaging with both young people and their parents, and, possibly more than anything else, he loves Bowdoin," Moll explained.
"Rarely does a person come along who is willing to devote his life to one cause. Mers is one of those people, and his good cause was Bowdoin College," Moll said.
Mersereau became the assistant dean of admissions "just as we announced to the world that we were making SATs optional," Moll said. Although it took three "boisterous" faculty meetings for Moll to get faculty approval for dropping the requirement, the risky decision paid off. A January 1970 article in The New York Times lauded Bowdoin's landmark decision. A number of others papers picked up the story and suddenly many more Americans knew about Bowdoin College.
Now was the time.
"Our applicant pool almost tripled overnight," Moll said. "What this meant was that each admissions officer had to do more in terms of reading folders."
"At our peak," Moll said, "each of us had to read 81 folders. That's 81 folders a day per person."
In some fashion, Moll was a mentor for Mersereau. "Some of his mentoring was watching a genius at work?passion, creativity, intelligence," Mersereau explained.
"He's a great writer, and he wrote a lot of his own admissions materials. He was intentional. He understood that everything you did in admissions?from the interview, to the letter of admission, to the spiel, to the promotional materials?all mattered and all reflected the College," Mers said. "He was a mentor in the sense that he had high standards: He demanded hard work, good writing, intelligence, creativity, passion."
Moll also had resilience, Mers explained, which was an essential attribute in bringing about change. "You can't come in as a change agent and expect everyone to be happy with that," Mersereau said. He learned from Moll that one has to be able to roll with the punches if one wants to change things.
Moll not only had a profound effect on the College, helping usher it into a new era, but also on Mers.
In his office, Mers has a surprising number of photographs. At first glance, all appear to be of his family. He is married and has a son and a daughter. He seems to have a picture of every iteration of the four of them: He has a photo of each of them by themselves, a picture of the whole family, a snapshot of just Mers and his daughter and just Mers and his son, a picture of him and his wife getting married.
There is also a picture of the women's varsity basketball team from the early 1980s.
Dick Mersereau knew a lot about basketball, and he volunteered to be the coach of the fledgling women's basketball team thinking that his knowledge of the game was all that was required. As it turned out, the job necessitated knowing about more than just hoops.
"As I'm fond of saying when anybody asks me, 'Well, what was coaching like?' It was 50 percent basketball and 50 percent politics," Mers explained to me one rainy Wednesday in October. "The politics had a lot to do with Bowdoin going coeducational." Luckily, Mers likes politics.
Bowdoin admitted its first coeducational class in the fall of 1971, and Mersereau's stint as a coach began in 1975. While Title IX?the federal law requiring that no one "be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance" on the basis of sex?had officially come into effect in 1972, when Mers started coaching, the Department of Athletics seemed to have missed the memo.
"There was a double standard in most everything," Mersereau said.
In his first year of coaching, the women's basketball team was required to both practice and play games in Sargent Gym, while the men practiced and played in Morrell Gym. Morrell had been built in 1968 and had substantially better facilities than Sargent.
"The issues with basketball?equal equipment, equal treatment, equal practice facilities and practice time, equal meal money when you're traveling on the road, equal schedule?these are all things that now we simply take for granted," Mers said. He explained that when he first began coaching, the men had a New England schedule whereas the women were restricted to playing only in Maine.
Being a volunteer and a first-time coach at Bowdoin and only 28 years old, Mersereau had little say in where his team practiced. Regardless of his lowly position, however, his patience with the College's athletic administration soon wore thin.
"It wasn't too long before I was saying, 'This doesn't feel right to me,'" Mersereau explained. He took his concerns to the people in the Department of Athletics and was dismayed by their reactions.
Now was the time.
"Their responses to my questions like 'How come we don't we practice and play in Morrell Gym?' would be unthinkable today," Mersereau said. "Then, the answer, even from the person in charge of women's athletics was, 'Well, the girls aren't as good as the boys, and they don't deserve to practice in Morrell.'"
Mersereau did not give up easily.
"When he thought something was unfair, he really went to bat for us," Nancy B. Steele '79 said. Steele, who had Mers as a coach for her fours years on the varsity team and was a co-captain in the 1978-1979 season, explained that his persistence paid off.
"He fought tooth and nail to get us practice time in Morrell Gym. It didn't come easily and it wasn't handed to him, but eventually he got it," Steele said.
As a volunteer coach who was not a member of the athletics department, Mersereau's demand that his basketball team be given equal treatment ruffled some feathers. "I was in my late 20s ...and it didn't take long for me to begin to make waves," he said.
One of the first things I noticed when I started talking with Mersereau is that he is a humble man who does not easily take responsibility for his successes. It often takes some prodding for him to concede that, yes, he did make a difference. And even when he does dutifully take responsibility for one of his accomplishments, he often riddles it with caveats.
"In a quiet way, over a period of years, I was somewhat of an agent for change," he admitted.
It wasn't that the College had the wrong intentions, Mers said. "Bowdoin was trying to be accommodating in a bureaucratic, slow, reactive way in the early years of coeducation," he said. As Mers calls it, it was "the growing pains of coeducation."
Mers had to deal with the politics of being a coach, but the game of basketball was the reason he was there and the reason his team was there. And, as with the political side of coaching, he was quite good at his job, according to the women who played on his team.
"He motivated his players really well," Debra J. Sanders '77 said. Sanders, now a special agent with the FBI, was the captain of the team for all of her four years at Bowdoin. "He got out there with us and took part in the exercises he gave us to do," she explained.
"I couldn't have asked for a better coach," Steele said. "I've played a lot of ball, and I've played for a lot of coaches, and he was the best, hands down. He knew basketball, and he knew his team," she said. "There are some coaches who know basketball and some coaches who are great working with individuals, but to find someone like Mers who was both in one person...well, that doesn't happen too often."
Mers's record for all six seasons as head coach of the Bowdoin women's basketball team was 87 wins and 32 losses?a winning percentage of .731.
Back on the third floor of 85 Federal St., toward the end of one of my interviews with Mers, we were discussing the upcoming capital campaign. He has been deeply involved in planning not only the campaign, but also the kickoff gala. He was explaining some of the logistics of setting the whole event up. I scribbled down some notes.
"Yep," Mers said, "now is the time..."
"What?" I asked.
"Now is the time to have a capital campaign. We have one about every 10 years."