To be at home

Editorial: Do the light thing

Last Friday, President Mills announced the College’s proposal to install a solar power complex spanning the roofs of Farley Field House and Watson Arena as well as three acres of the recently-acquired former Naval Air Station property. If the project obtains the necessary local, state and federal approvals, it will be the largest solar power installation in the state, with the potential to generate 1.6 million kilowatt-hours of power and offset Bowdoin’s annual electricity consumption by 8 percent.
The announcement made headlines in the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle and on the Huffington Post, highlighting Bowdoin’s efforts to remain at the forefront of renewable energy use. We applaud the plan’s movement toward institutional sustainability, taking steps beyond encouraging individuals to recycle or turn off the lights. But we should note that the project is still no more than a promising prospect—a preliminary step toward our ultimate carbon neutrality goals. The College must still jump through a number of regulatory hoops before ground will be broken at the Naval Air Station, and electricity prices have yet to be established. It will be a few years before the panels will become fully operational.
As Bowdoin seeks to benefit from the construction of Maine’s largest solar-panel facility, the state as a whole has missed an opportunity in another field of renewable energy. On Tuesday, the Norwegian company Statoil announced that it will not proceed with plans to build a $120 million wind farm on the coast. A spokesperson for the company attributed the decision partially to legislation signed by Governor LePage in June that reopened the bidding war for offshore wind power. LePage stated his opposition to the deal when it was announced last winter. According to the Portland Press Herald, the governor criticized the agreement because it offered Statoil an above-market rate for the electricity it would provide to the state. As a result, Maine loses a multi-million dollar investment in green energy and jobs as well as an opportunity to be a national leader in harvesting offshore wind power.

Editorial: Snappy response

In response to the recent bias incidents on campus, a group of student leaders will be installing a display of black and white portraits of students and faculty in Smith Union this weekend to show support for any who feel targeted or marginalized by these incidents. Throughout the week, student photographers sat outside the entrances of both dining halls during dinner to solicit individuals’ participation, asking each person whether they would take a photo “for the bias incident thing.”
While we applaud our fellow students’ effort to unify the campus, we feel this emphasis on participation and urgency did not engage the nuances that precipitated the incidents in the first place. We would like to believe that each face that appears on the wall represents a student who has done this out of genuine support, not out of a sense of social obligation. There is subtle but coercive social pressure to comply with the request and avoid the risk of being labelled as insensitive. We understand there are a variety of reasons why someone may not want their photo on public display. Providing a medium to express clear and visible support for those affected by the bias incidents is laudable, and we hope that the upcoming show will spark conversations that have so far been glossed over.
The editorial represents the majority view of the Bowdoin Orient’s editorial board, which is comprised of Claire Aasen, Erica Berry, Nora Biette-Timmons, Marisa McGarry, Eliza Novick-Smith, Sam Miller and Sam Weyrauch.

Editorial

This piece represents the opinion of The Bowdoin Orient editorial board.

October 25, 2013

On Wednesday, President Mills sent out a campus-wide email highlighting an incident on October 10 when an intoxicated Brunswick resident made homophobic and sexist remarks before punching a student outside of Joshua’s Restaurant and Tavern. This violent altercation sticks out as an anomaly in the otherwise peaceful relationship between the College and the greater Brunswick community.

The dispute outside Joshua’s is not indicative of deep-rooted us-and-them tension. Most of the faculty and staff live in town, send their children to Brunswick schools, pay Brunswick taxes and shop at Brunswick stores. Many restaurants on Maine Street now accept students’ OneCards, and town auditors are a familiar sight in class. The relationship between Bowdoin Security and Brunswick Police Department is a symbiotic one that encourages cooperation between the forces. Incidents like those we covered this week are perhaps an inevitable consequence of living in a place where people are not all the same. It is important to address and try to make sense of these individual acts of violence and bigotry, but it is also important to remember that they do not characterize our town-gown relationship as a whole.

In March of 2011, someone vandalized a white board in Coles Tower. Dean of Student Affairs Tim Foster sent a campus-wide email soon after the incident was reported, explaining what had transpired, and condemning the act as “targeted hate speech.” Several days later, a community-wide forum was convened to discuss not only the event but also other instances of bias. The following fall, our editorial board applauded Bowdoin’s active response to the incident, contrasting it with the hands-off approach the Williams administration took immediately following a hate crime on their campus. We saw a similiarly supportive reaction from Bowdoin this week: yesterday, a closed meeting at 30 College Street brought multicultural campus leaders together to discuss moving forward in the aftermath of the week’s reports. A follow-up forum on Sunday will further the discussion.

Brunswick is not an intolerant community, but at Bowdoin we are largely insulated from overt demonstrations of bigotry. However, it’s not uncommon for students to report hearing derogatory or sexually explicit language yelled out of the windows of passing cars. There are certainly students who feel unsafe both on and off campus, and we do not want to minimize the very real concerns students and faculty have brought to light.

The best thing to do in the aftermath is to move forward, which we will only do by continuing dialogue. We should not stay away from Joshua’s or anywhere else in Brunswick—intolerance thrives when stereotypes go unexamined and unchallenged.

The editorial represents the majority view of the Bowdoin Orient’s editorial board, which is comprised of Claire Aasen, Erica Berry, Nora Biette-Timmons, Marisa McGarry, Eliza Novick-Smith, Sam Miller and Sam Weyrauch.

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