President Mills should also be Professor Mills

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President Mills should also be Professor Mills

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Judah Isseroff

Columnist

September 9, 2011

Dear President Mills,

My name is Judah Isseroff and I am a junior at Bowdoin.

In my two years here, I've been able to watch you from a distance.

On nice days in the autumn and spring, it has been rare to not see you strolling the grounds of the picturesque Bowdoin Quad, asking questions and doling out nods and smiles.

I've sat in the audience for your convocation addresses. Particularly memorable was your speech last year on the difficult issue of political diversity at the College. I left the auditorium lost in thoughts that ultimately inspired one of my earliest columns for this paper.

Dearest to my heart have been those instances when I've seen you at services for the high holy days of the Jewish calendar. Though the opportunity was exclusive to the Jewish population at Bowdoin, I was grateful for the chance to experience some spiritual solidarity with my college's president.

For those of us who saw you there, your presence was invaluable. For even from a distance across the congregation, I was a beneficiary of your committed participation in the service. It was no small thing to feel a kinship of shared values with you. Put simply, all my experiences involving you thus far have been positive without exception.

However, I'm writing you this "letter" because I think that you are holding out on us: I really think you should teach a class at the college. In a world where bold leadership is on the outs, colleges have the potential to remain a bastion for intellectual integrity.

While our media and our politics have found no higher task for themselves than showing what is absolutely worst in human beings, Bowdoin remains a place where plastic young minds may choose a healthy idealism over the sneering cynicism that has infected many of this country's other institutions.

Mr. President, considering the overwhelming hostility of the "real world" to any sort of optimism, Bowdoin students need you to courageously show the great things that can still be learned at a liberal arts college. I personally am desperately curious to know what you care most about, what you would most like to impart to the students that pass through your school.

Furthermore, there are whisperings here, some soft and discreet, and some much louder, that accuse you of a sort of intellectual disengagement. You are concerned solely with reputation, endowment, and ethnic diversity, so the story goes. Moreover, they say that because you are not an academic, you are glaringly out of place as president.

As I have said, as a nominally average student at Bowdoin, my impression of you is without a blemish. However, I think that even the slightest persistence of the aforementioned rumors and sentiments of discontent does tremendous harm to the spiritedness of Bowdoin.

While the College needs diversity of opinion in its discourse, I believe that it also needs a certain uniformity of purpose. Without qualification, Bowdoin must see itself as a place where learning remains fresh and dynamic. And you, sir, are the most respected symbol of that mission and must embody it completely.

Therefore, while I am truly grateful for all that you have done to improve and steer this place, I crave a more personal attention for the student body. With a law degree from Columbia, a Ph.D. in biology and a very successful law career, it is unimaginable that you do not have a wealth of expertise to share with us.

Though I am nearly ignorant of all conventions with regard to teaching on the part of college presidents, I do know that the hype surrounding a seminar taught by President Mills could only help to improve this school.

I also know that in a world where leadership has come to mean babysitting and petty conflict resolution, you would do an inestimable amount good by demonstrating that positions of power are not innately emasculating.

Rather, by establishing a closer and more directly educational interface with your students, we will all graduate from this school with a more complete conception of the good that Bowdoin attempts to instill. We will have been the beneficiaries of the expertise of another very smart and very compelling educator.

More importantly though, teaching a class will provide you with a salient platform from which to talk about and demonstrate your vision for the liberal arts.

And certainly that vision will make its way from your direct pupils to the rest of the student body, for we are all in immense need of your leadership and your expertise.

Sincerely and respectfully yours,

Judah Isseroff '13

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