Decades ago, Richard A. Mersereau sat in a classroom, slightly incredulous, as Professor Daniel Levine began a survey course of American history by asking him, "What is history?"
"Can he really be asking that?" Merserau thought to himself. "Everyone knows what history is."
Levine explained what he meant.
It is of vital importance, Levine lectured his class, that one asks the right questions. Mersereau listened.
Before he was the secretary of Bowdoin College, before he was an assistant to the president, before he was the director of communications, before he was a husband and the father of two kids, before he was the director of summer programs, before he was the coach of the women's basketball team, before he was an assistant director of the admissions office, before he was at graduate school, and before he was in the military, Mersereau, a sophomore at Bowdoin, learned to ask the right questions.
"One of the things that I remember Levine saying," Mers, the name he goes by, explained, "and it has always stayed with me, is, 'In doing history, or in writing a history paper, or whatever...it's important to ask the right question, because there are lots of questions. Questions can be global, but before you decide to focus on something, spend as much time as you need to make sure you're asking the right question as opposed to just one of those questions that comes to mind.' I've never forgotten that," Mers said.
Forty years later, Mersereau is standing in a large hallway at the Kennedy Library in Boston surrounded by a veritable "who's who" of Bowdoin alumni. The kick-off event for The Bowdoin Campaign, an effort to raise $250 million for the school's endowment, has just concluded. Hundreds of people are milling about, crowding the tables filled with coffee and delicious bite-sized deserts, schmoozing with each other and reconnecting with classmates who they have not seen for years.
Mers is situated between the desserts and the library's exit and seems to know everyone who passes?Bowdoin faculty, alumni, spouses of alums, students?everyone. He doesn't just recognize people; he remembers a lot about them, too.
"How's the degree going? And how has the weather been?" Mers says to young alumna in her mid-20s who is working on a doctorate in education at the University of Washington. "A lot of rain?" he asks.
"Hiya Bill. How are you?" he says to Dean of Admissions Bill Shain.
"I'm curious," he says to the wife of an alum, "who have you met tonight that you're going to beat in tennis?" Mers recounts, for the benefit of the other people gathered around him, the time when the woman beat him quite badly in a tennis match?when she was seven months pregnant.
"I didn't beat you that badly," the woman says, laughing.
Mers is easygoing and friendly. His demeanor immediately puts people at ease. Mers's sense of humor is strong, but not sharp?his words never really cut at anyone. He is skilled at politics?few are as familiar with the inner workings of the administration of the College as Mers is?but he could never be a politician in the local, state, or national sense of the word. He is far too nice.
Mers did not actively seek out his career at Bowdoin. He planned on teaching African studies to high school students but got a call from Dick Moll right after he finished his master's in education at Wesleyan. Moll, who was Bowdoin's pioneering dean of admissions in the early '70s, asked Mers to apply for a position in the admissions office. He came back to Brunswick to work for Moll as an assistant dean of admissions. And, as Mers often says, "The rest is history."
Bowdoin College was a very different place when Dick Mersereau arrived in Brunswick as a first year in 1965. Most significantly, there were no female students here. About 97 percent of the men here belonged to fraternities, and academic requirements were substantial, allowing for only three or four elective courses by the end of one's sophomore year. There was no off-campus study program in place, there was an on-campus military science department that ran ROTC, there were very few students of color at the school. The list of differences between Bowdoin in '65 and Bowdoin in '06 is almost endless.
Mers has seen a lot of change.
Born and raised in Massachusetts, Mers lived in Arlington, Massachusetts, for the first years of his life. The Mersereau family moved to Hamilton, Massachusetts, when Richard was seven years old. Hamilton, on the North Shore of Massachusetts, was a very "nondiverse" town, according to Mers; coming to the College revealed facets of the world to him that he did not know existed. "Bowdoin was a big eye opener for me," Mers said. Both his classes and the current events of the day heavily impacted his philosophy and contributed to his education.
"I was also here at a time of great ferment where if your eyes weren't open to something, you were asleep," he said. "The Vietnam War and the racial...ferment in the cities, urban versus rural, the environmental questions; just sort of all the '60s stuff was very real," he added.
"Happily it was very real here both in real terms like, 'My God, they're going to send me to Vietnam, and what do I think about that?' but also in intellectual terms, sort of studying it all and reading the newspapers, watching the news," Mers explained. "So many students got very involved in the changing of America. It was sort of a great time to be in college intellectually."
Professors were a key part of that intellectual experience and, along with Dan Levine of the history department, Mers was deeply influenced by John Rensenbrink, then a professor in the government department.
Professor Emeritus of Government John Rensenbrink, who is 78 years old, can today retell with precision events that happened more than four decades ago.
He has also had an amazing career. He taught at Bowdoin from 1965 to 1995, with a few years taken off for research mid-way through his career. (Rensenbrink now works on a limited basis with students completing independent studies.) He is an author and speaker, and he co-founded the Green Party of the United States and founded the Green Party of Maine.
In his sophomore year, Mers enrolled in Rensenbrink's comparative government class, "which just furthered my eye-opening," he said. Mers "learned about different cultures, how different governments were put together, which things were working and which things weren't."
Rensenbrink had spent three years in Africa and spoke often about his experiences there. Mers was intrigued. Senior year, Mers decided to focus his honors project on politics in Tanzania. Rensenbrink and Mers developed a friendly relationship, and when Rensenbrink needed a teaching assistant for a course?a new type of class called a "freshman seminar"?Mers was chosen. The course was focused on "African political development and the forces of change."
"The idea of teaching a seminar to freshmen on a subject that was relatively narrow was a bold idea?it was incredibly innovative and it needed support from the faculty," Mers said.
It was support that Rensenbrink just barely received. Many faculty members thought it was poor pedagogy to teach first-year students in a seminar style. A number of professors also found teaching non-Western studies to be a waste of time.
"There was a lot of debate in the faculty on whether we should do something on Africa or not," Rensenbrink said.
"Stacey Coles," Rensenbrink said, "who was president [of the College] at that time, took me aside one time before the faculty meeting and said, 'Let's work out what you're going to say and how you're going to say it so that we can get this thing through.' And we did manage to squeak it through the faculty."
"Out of that course," Rensenbrink said, "came the notion that freshman seminars?or first-year seminars as we call them now?would be a good thing to do."
Only 40 years ago, many members of the Bowdoin faculty questioned the value of non-Eurocentric studies.
"Looking back upon that now," Rensenbrink said, chuckling, "it seems rather amazing that we were even arguing that point. But there were some people on the faculty who were really suspicious of non-Western studies."
"So Rensenbrink's experiment helped to change the Bowdoin curriculum," Mers explained. "And, of course, now the idea of a freshman seminar has been adopted by the College as a requirement."
Mers, in the midst of telling stories about his life, often interrupts himself to tell what he calls a "throwaway" anecdote.
They always end up being important.
"Barry Mills was in that seminar along with about 15 others," Mers recalled, "and I know for a fact that some of the alumni that Barry has been closest to over the years were in that seminar." Mers paused. "But I mean, that's just a sort of throwaway."
"I took many courses with Rensenbrink while I was at Bowdoin," President Barry Mills said. "In fact, he was principally the reason I was a government major."
"Call it a course in sociology," Mers said. "A bunch of guys like me are in the military because we joined the National Guard or the Reserves to avoid going to Vietnam." For those who could not get themselves out of draft and avoid serving in the military, staying out of Vietnam was the second-best option. That there was another way of looking at the military was very foreign, if not incomprehensible to these men.
"It didn't occur to me until I was on patrol" at an army base in South Carolina, "with this one Mexican-American guy from El Paso and we had 10 minutes in a car. I asked him some questions about himself," Mers recalled. The man from El Paso had 11 siblings. The conversation shifted and Mers began telling his fellow soldier stories about the great lengths some of his friends went to get medical deferments, searching for any doctor who would say that they were unfit to serve because of some medical problem. "He was telling me stories about how he and members of his family and his friends would find doctors to pass them on their exams so they could get into the army." For many, Mers learned, the military, far from being a deadly burden, was a huge opportunity.
"It was a crash course in American sociology," Mers said, referring to his whole military experience. A few seconds passed and his mind seemed to drift back to his time in South Carolina. "And it was the longest four months of my life?it felt like four years."
The College underwent monumental changes in 1970 and Mers returned to Bowdoin in the thick of it. The academic requirements that had been part of the school's curriculum since its inception were abolished, the school went coeducational, strict social prohibitions were repealed, the Senior Center (now Coles Tower) ceased housing only seniors, drugs began to appear on the campus, Bowdoin was becoming a very different place. Also, toward the end of the spring semester, students went on strike and stopped attending class to protest the Vietnam War.
As Mers explains it, the College became "laissez-faire" in its administration of the school. Instead of making a strong plan to become co-ed and executing it, the College meandered into coeducation. "I think the laissez-faire policy towards fraternities was the worst course the College" could have taken. Mers said that although he was not smart enough at the time to realize it, fraternities and coeducation could not happily coexist at Bowdoin.
In the mid-1970s, the ledger from the Office of Summer Programming was dripping red; the office was in debt.
Bowdoin's administrators decided to end all summer programs at Bowdoin to save money, and they hired Dick Mersereau to do it.
When he became director of summer programs, his official task was to study the summer programs that used Bowdoin each year, but Mers was well aware that the administration expected him to come to the conclusion that summer programs on campus should be canceled. "The administration had decided that summer programs were much more trouble than they were worth, Mers said. "They were losing money." Mers was asked to "take over the summer programs for one year while we [the College] killed them." Although on the surface it made sense to shut down money-draining programs that did not take place during the academic year, there were other issues at stake. Mers started asking a lot of questions, mainly, what would be the consequences?locally, politically, statewide?of shutting down all summer programming that took place on Bowdoin's campus.
"I looked at it quite thoroughly," Mers explained, "including the business side of it and concluded that it would be stupid, immoral, politically impossible, and financially short-sighted to do away with it." Having come from admissions, Mers's first instinct was that an empty campus during the summer did not reflect the College well to prospective students and their families. "We had a huge number of visitors to the campus in the summer and they'd be walking around looking at buildings with no people in [them]," Mers said. "What does that suggest about how vibrant the College is from a practical standpoint?" That was the "stupid" aspect.
Mers generally speaks quite carefully, choosing his words and phrases. For subjects that have the potential, at least in his line of work, to be minefields?generally issues that might offend alumni, how strong the College was in one era compared to another?he treads carefully. Mers never tiptoes around potentially damaging subjects, but rather pauses, plans his route, and walks confidently on his predetermined path. There are exceptions, however. When Mers is passionate about something, it shows. Whatever subconscious censor usually keeps him from saying potentially inflammatory words disappears. Not only would canceling summer programs have been "stupid" and "short-sighted," according to Mers, it would have been immoral.
"Immoral in the sense that you've raised money and you've built all these buildings and you're going to think that the way to use them is to close them down for three months?" Mers questioned rhetorically. He believed that killing the summer programs to save money would have been contrary to the College's mission to further the "common good."
Upward Bound, he mentioned, was one of the programs that was slated to be cut.
Mers decided to make his job about answering a different question then the one he was given. The question was no longer only about stopping red ink, but rather about how Bowdoin could embrace its mission to further the common good during the summer in a way that was financially prudent. The answer, Mers thought, was to move toward two objectives at the same time.
"One objective was to do good things," he said, referring to programs like Upward Bound. "The other objective was to find other things that weren't bad things, that were good things, but maybe not as close to the [College's] mission, that would make money," he said, putting the objectives of the Office of Summer Programs, as he saw them, in the simplest terms.
A small article in the October 10, 1976, edition of the Orient led with the following sentence: "In a reversal of a previous decision to cancel Bowdoin's summer programs as an economy measure, college officials announced Monday that the campus would remain open this summer..."
Mers oversaw the multitude of summer programs that Bowdoin played host to between 1974 and 1982. Programs that were held at Bowdoin during his tenure in the Office of Summer Programs included everything from the mundane?a meeting of tax assessors?to the exciting?the Maine Arts Festival?to events that still come back to Bowdoin every summer, like the Bowdoin International Music Festival, the Infrared Spectroscopy Course, Upward Bound, the hockey clinic and the Maine State Music Theater.
Looking at Merserau's time in the Office of Summer Programs, it is clear that he did not do the job he was asked to do. Mers was tacitly told to cancel all the programs and ended up adding more of them. While that may have displeased the administration in the 1970s, today, one would be hard-pressed to find an advocate for shutting Bowdoin's gates every summer. Mers, it seems, was asking the right questions.
In 2000, the College was looking for a new president. Barry Mills, a managing partner at one of New York's premier law firms, and a longtime Bowdoin trustee, headed the search committee.
Before he left his position as chair of the committee (Mills recused himself when the committee began considering him for the position), he would often make trips between New York and Bowdoin.
"My vivid memory is getting off an airplane from New York City in the middle of the winter to come to some meeting at Bowdoin," Mills recalled. "Mers picked me and there in the front seat of his red Subaru is this bag from McDonald's with," Mills paused for emphasis, "a lobster roll."
On his desk in his office on the third floor of 85 Federal St., Mers keeps a stack of white, square, Post-It-sized pieces of paper. He writes little notes on them, various reminders to himself. He was mulling the question of how Bowdoin has changed during his time here when he grabbed a square of paper and scribbled down the word "psychology."
It may seem odd to look at an institution psychologically, but if Bowdoin is on the couch, Mers should be the man in the chair asking the questions.
"Bowdoin was my first choice," Mers said, "but for many of my classmates, Bowdoin was a second-choice college. Many of them became wild supporters of the College, but psychologically they always felt like Bowdoin was second-rate. For an awful long time," Mers explained, "the College had to apologize...and always felt like it was in the second tier?and that's a powerful psychological burden to carry. And, if you believe it?maybe you believe we're second rate and we'll always be second-rate?it's a powerful psychological force that, if allowed to maintain itself, can become a self-fulfilling prophecy," Mers said.
"The students who came here in the mid '70s came here enthusiastically. It was their first choice," Mers said, attributing the change in attitude to Dick Moll. "Psychologically, it lifted this place up."
The spirit of the College changed in the next two decades, according to Mers. "I think," Mers said, "because of what happened in the '80s and '90s where we were less success..." Mers's self-censor kicked in and his words grinded to a halt. A beat. "...less overtly successful?and this may have reflected the moods of the country. The '80s and '90s were calmer and the times were less interesting overall; it's certainly not a slight on students or on anyone else who was here...but psychologically I think we began to slip..." Mers said. A more laissez-faire attitude reigned again.
When Bob Edwards became president, the end of laissez-faire governance was a fait accompli.
"There was an awful lot of change that needed to happen, pretty much across the board, particularly in the first three years [of Edwards' presidency], which is how long it took to balance the budget," Mers said.
"A lot of the changes that the board and Edwards agreed needed to be accomplished weren't necessarily popular," Mers explained. They were unpopular but necessary, he said.
The two largest changes during the '90s involved fraternities and the College administration. Mers was involved in both.
The streamlining of the College's administration, among many changes, created a single governing body, the Board of Trustees.
The Commission on Residential Life (CRL), which was created to examine the Greek system at Bowdoin, issued the report that led to the abolishment of fraternities and the creation of the College House System.
"The results of the CRL are one of the smartest and best things that we've ever done at Bowdoin. It's not to say that the house system itself is the best thing since sliced bread, but it's allowing, across the board, the right questions to be asked about residential life," Mers said.
"I think the results speak for themselves. Bowdoin is a much stronger place at the end of the '90s than it was at the beginning of the '90s," Mers said. "Being part of all of that change was exhilarating; it was also exhausting and difficult," Mers said.
"It's hard to think about what this college would be like if he wasn't here," Mills said.
Bowdoin would indeed be a very different place had Dick Mersereau not come here in 1965. Over the years, almost always behind the scenes, Mers has changed Bowdoin in substantial, lasting ways. As important a player as he has been in the recent history of Bowdoin College, what Mers has seen is even more revealing than what he has done. He has a perspective of Bowdoin that, in its depth, length, and breadth, is truly unmatched. He has had a close-up view of Bowdoin?how it has changed and how it has remained the same?for more than 40 years, as a student, a coach and an administrator. In looking at Dick Mersereau's career, we can see not only whence Bowdoin came, but also the direction Bowdoin is headed.
In his October 1969 inaugural address, President Roger Howell Jr. reminded Bowdoin of "the poles between which the innovative college finds itself, caught between the uncritical lovers on the one hand, the unloving critics on the other."
Howell, only 32 years old at the time of his inauguration, was, by any measure, wise beyond his years. "A true understanding and love a college like Bowdoin," he said in that address, "should lead to exhilaration at the prospect of continuing change, rather than worship at the shrine of a glorious past." Dick Mersereau may embody this true understanding and love of Bowdoin.
"There are folks who get connected to a place who really define the fabric of it," Mills said. "Mers is one of those guys."
Mersereau understands the necessity of change. He groks the historical precedent for fluidity of method in bringing about a better Bowdoin. Mersereau understands that, in the words of Howell, "The mission of the College may remain a fixed point; the means by which it will accomplish that mission must and will change year to year and generation to generation."
Mers readily admits that College is not perfect, that there is work to be done to make Bowdoin a better place, that we, as an institution, don't have all the answers. But unlike 40 years ago when he first arrived on campus, in 2006, Bowdoin is asking the right questions.
This is part two of a two-part series. The first part of "The Man Behind the Curtain" was published last week.