The Bowdoin Orient

The Masque and Gown mainstage welcomed several new members last night as it debuted Dipika Guha’s 2015 play, "Blown Youth." The cast of the production is all women, the majority of whom are women of color and the rest of whom are OutPeers. It is entirely composed of people who have never been in a Masque and Gown show. 

Bringing more kinds of people into Bowdoin’s theater community is a focus for director Mackenzie Schafer ’19. This was reflected in her selection of "Blown Youth" when applying to direct the Masque and Gown spring production, as well as the decisions she made casting the production. 

“There hasn’t been a single person of color in a Masque and Gown show since I’ve been on campus,” said Schafer. “I could feel the frustration of different friends who feel like they weren’t getting cast because there were no roles for them because the shows that kept getting selected were, like, white family dramas that were very heteronormative.”

While the process of finding the perfect show was neither easy nor quick, Schafer is looking forward to showing "Blown Youth" at Bowdoin. 

“It took me so long to find the show, but I was really excited to find it because it offered a lot of roles for different types of people,” she said. “I feel like so many people are so underrepresented in theater, especially people of color and queer people. I also thought that we had a really strong community of actresses on campus and I really wanted to showcase that.”

"Blown Youth" tells the story of seven women living in and around an all-female intentional community. The play is divided into three parts: one with the characters five years out of college, another with them in their 30s and a third section that is a flashback to their time in college. According to Guha’s website, the play asks “what happens to the universe if a woman is at its center.” 

At its core, "Blown Youth" is about the experiences of women navigating the world as real, complicated, multidimensional people. 

Sophie Sadovnikoff ’19 plays Celia, an aspiring actress who, despite her passion for it, cannot act. She goes to auditions, but never makes it into the casting room, always running out before her name is called. 

“The three phrases I use to describe [Celia’s] story are ambition, mental illness and loss,” said Sadovnikoff. “That is a lot of the work I’m doing in the show. It’s telling the story of a person who is overcome by mental illness and wasn’t able to achieve the things she wanted to.”

The show deals with many heavy and timely themes, which the cast has spent a lot of time discussing, but the rehearsal process has remained positive. 

“It’s been a tiring experience—there are some really intense moments in the show. I think our cast does a really good job of turning it on when we’re working and turning it off when we don’t need to be,” said Sadovnikoff. “We have a lot of fun together as a cast, we spend a lot of time kind of goofing off and singing and being weird, and I think that lightness and energy to the cast has really helped keep us out of a place where we’re constantly in our heads.”

The cast of "Blown Youth" contains several members who have not acted at Bowdoin—or at all. This has presented challenges but also opportunities for the cast to grow together and learn from each other. 

“It’s definitely changed things, but in such an exciting way," said Aziza Janmohamed ’19, who plays Margaret in the show. "It’s really fun to get people who have never done it before because they have these new and different perspectives that you may not have and I think one of the most helpful things for me has been the questions that they ask ... With them especially, it’s been really fun to watch them and help them and have them help me also. There’s an honest connection there.” 

Schafer and other members of Masque and Gown worked hard to recruit a diverse group of people for auditions, which ultimately gave them the flexibility to cast the show in the way they did. Having brought new people into Bowdoin’s theater community, and a play to campus unlike many of the other ones that have been produced, the question now is how to keep the momentum going.

“I think it’s really important for the theater community at Bowdoin to continue to keep these really open minds and to continue to look for different stories and unique perspectives that may or may not be told. That doesn’t mean you can’t do what’s been done in the past. There’s something really great about older playwrights and the things they have to say, because those are stories too, but then also looking for new things,” said Janmohamed. 

The cast of "Blown Youth" is excited for their run and for what the show means for campus. 

“It’s so many firsts in so many ways. It’s all women, written by a woman of color, directed by a woman, we all are sort of going through this new pathway and I hope it’s a trend that continues. Not just for Masque and Gown but for theater at Bowdoin in general,” said Janmohamed. “It’s nice to be able to bring this story to the forefront and be like, this is what’s happening, we’re here, we also live in this world and we’re here to tell our stories.” 

"Blown Youth" will be performed tonight and tomorrow at 7:30 p.m. in Pickard Theater. Tickets are $1 for students and $3 for non-students and are available at the David Saul Smith Union Info Desk. 

Despite having a significantly larger endowment and spending more on financial aid, Bowdoin is not admitting significantly more students who receive financial aid. This has been the status quo at Bowdoin for the past 15 years. In 2002, roughly 40 percent of the student body received aid. In 2006, it was still 40 percent. As of the fall of 2016, 44 percent of the student body receives financial aid, meaning that over the past 15 years, the percentage of the student body receiving financial aid has increased by only 4 percentage points. 

A study from the Equality of Opportunity Project republished in the New York Times last week laid bare the socioeconomic composition of the Bowdoin student body. The report shows 20 percent of the Bowdoin student body comes from the top 1 percent of the income spectrum (family income greater than aprox $630,000 per year,) which is more students than there are in the bottom three income quintiles combined. 69 percent of students' family incomes fall in the top quintile of the national income distribution, meaing their family made more than aprox. $110,000 per year.  Only 3.8 percent of students come from the bottom 20 percent (families who made less than aprox. $20,000 per year). 

The study also revealed that the financial composition of the student body did not change significantly over the period it addressed (between 1998 and 2009). According to data from the College’s common data set and Office of Institutional Research and Consulting, the percentage of students receiving financial aid remained at roughly 45 percent of the student body from 2008 to 2015. 

Since 2008, Bowdoin’s endowment per student has increased at an average rate of 3.8 percent per year reaching $1.5 million per student in 2015. Its average financial aid grant has increased at an average rate of 3.2 percent per year, but the College’s comprehensive fee increased at a similar average rate of 3.2 percent per year. 

These numbers raise significant questions about the effectiveness of the College’s need-blind admissions policy (which has been in place for over 15 years) in actively creating socioeconomically diverse classes. They also indicate that the school’s ever increasing comprehensive fee is at odds with this mission. 

Bowdoin regularly talks about diversity as a priority and socioeconomic diversity is a big part of this. The College has made real steps over this period, such as eliminating loans as an aspect of financial aid packages in 2008 under former President Barry Mills and dropping the application fee for first-generation and financial aid-seeking applicants in 2016. 

President Clayton Rose confirmed this mission and his desire to build more socioeconomic diversity, but argued that maintaining a roughly steady level of financial aid recipients itself has taken work. 

“The steady state of students who are attending elite schools who come from the low economic strata suggests that there’s been some real work that’s kept that number at that level and I think that our experience bears that out. I think we’ve worked really hard to make that happen and a number of our peer schools, perhaps all of them, have as well. And I think the fruit of that is that we’ve been able to keep that steady.” 

Both Rose and Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Whitney Soule defended the College’s need-blind admissions policy. 

“I would say that being need-blind is a huge opportunity for this college,” said Soule. “To put the emphasis on going out to find the students who have the qualities that we’re seeking and look at them as people and to be going through a recruitment and selection process that is separating them from need. And I think it’s an incredibly important value.” 

Soule also said that the need-blind process actually does create socioeconomically diverse classes. 

“We are not placing investigation or emphasis on [socioeconomic diversity] on a particular application. How much does the student need? But by being need-blind, it naturally is setting our admit decisions across the array of the socioeconomic strata.”

While the College does enroll students from across the socioeconomic spectrum, the newly published data indicate that it enrolls a disproportionate number of students from the high end of the income spectrum. 

Rose emphasized the structural factors that prevent Bowdoin from creating socioeconomically diverse classes. 

“Our challenge—and we know this is true and the study reinforces it—our challenge and every school’s challenge is that the number of low income students that apply to elite schools is lower than it should be.”

Soule added that often, students lower on the income spectrum are not thinking about and not prepared for elite schools like Bowdoin. 

“If you think about the country at large and much of education ... there’s public funding in every state that educates most of our young people,” she said. “And the disparity of the quality of education, across resources—that also plays out in preparation for higher ed and who’s thinking about going to a school like Bowdoin and how we find those students.” 

Soule and Rose both emphasized that admissions outreach and recruiting has a big effect on who applies to Bowdoin and is the primary tool the school uses to attract lower income students. The more lower-income students that become aware of Bowdoin, the more that apply and the more the College is able to admit.  

Every year, Bowdoin sends its 14 admissions officers across the country to meet with prospective applicants at high schools and college fairs. Last year, they visited 450 schools. Sending them to areas of socioeconomic diversity is a priority. 

Admissions employs various methods to attract lower-income students including partnering with community based college-prep organizations so that more lower income students are aware of Bowdoin and traveling with groups of admissions counselors from other peer schools like Pomona and Swarthmore.

Soule said that for the past three years she has abandoned the practice of taking a two-week trip to New York City where she would hold a series of information sessions with students at specific schools, many of them private. Instead, for the past three years, the admissions team has held a few information session nights and invited students from across the city. 

She says this gets prospective students who are lower on the income spectrum in the room with a more diverse range of applications and helps them see themselves in the context of a more diverse Bowdoin rather than the more limited applicant pool that might show up to an information session at any given school. 

“What it does is it brings a lot of people into a room, often with a lot more kids and their parents from all over the city from different boroughs and from completely different kinds of high schools. And when you sit in that room and look around at the people who are interested in Bowdoin, that’s what our prospect pool is, so that’s been really effective.”

This is a strategy Soule hopes to employ in other cities in the future. 

The steady increase in the cost of college is a factor that works against its ability to provide access to lower-income students. As the cost of college goes up, so does the amount of financial aid required to send a student to Bowdoin. If rate of growth of financial aid grants does not exceed the rate of tuition growth, the financial aid dollars available to distribute will only cover roughly the same number of students.

Addressing the increasing cost of college is a priority for Rose. 

“We’re going through serious exercises to understand our budget, to take out whatever fat—fat isn’t even the word because there’s no fat in it—but really making tough choices about where we’re going to spend our money,” he said.

Currently, roughly 64 percent of the budget goes to payroll and 36 percent of the budget goes to operations. Rose said touching payroll is not an option and that the focus of his budget review will be on the 34 percent that is dedicated to operations. 

According to Senior Vice President for Finance and Administration and Treasurer Matt Orlando, the budget office has implemented a new practice this budget season that requires departments to justify every expenditure in their budgets and presumes a 0 percent growth rate rather than the traditional 2-4 percent increase. 

Orlando said the practice is aimed at slowing the growth of departmental budgets and identifying areas of spending that may no longer be priorities. 

Still, some of the increasing cost is tied to inflation—around 2-3 percent currently—and is likely inevitable.

Bowdoin’s performance in admitting students from lower on the income spectrum does not compare poorly to its peer schools.

Jordan Richmond ’16, who worked on the Equality of Opportunity project as a predoctoral fellow with Stanford economics professor Raj Chetty, said that one of the study’s key findings is that across the board, the percentage of poor students at elite schools has remained the same over the course of the study, from 1998 to 2009.

Despite expressing support for a socioeconomically diverse class, Rose believes that a student body that reflects an equal distribution across the income spectrum of the country is not realistic and is not Bowdoin’s mission. 

“The idea that we should look like the country—I think that’s unrealistic in that not every student is prepared for Bowdoin and many students from low-income backgrounds are engaged in educational experiences in junior high and high and grammar school which leave them ill-prepared. Our job is to find all those great students, if we can, that have the ability to do the work here and get them to apply to Bowdoin,” he said. 

“The real thing, I think, to take away from all of this is that how you interpret your results totally depends on what you think the goals of a college are and what our model of education should aim to accomplish,” said Richmond. 

Gideon Moore contributed to this report.

The College lost two valued members of its community and giants in its history when Frederick G. P. Thorne ’57 H ’05, and Harry K. Warren passed away over the summer.

Thorne will be remembered as a kind, perceptive and generous man, who saw the College through many important transitions. He served as an overseer or trustee during the tenures of five Bowdoin presidents, and was chair of the board of trustees from 1996 to 1999. He also led two presidential search committees. While he gave his opinions—and stood by them—he never resisted change when he saw the benefit for the college that he loved.

“He was a really remarkable guy,” said former President Barry Mills. “Some people as they get older can get sort of set in their ways, they don’t understand changing times, but Fred was a leader at Bowdoin through all of the transitions that the college has gone through. He never got locked into the past—he was always thinking about the future. Whether it was fraternity issues or coeducation or gender equity, or access and affordability, when those issues became important at the college, Fred bought [into them] and was a leader.”

“When the hard jobs were required to be done and he was on watch, he stepped up and led the College in a really remarkable way,” said President Clayton Rose.

Senior Vice President for Investments Paula Volent met Thorne when she interviewed for a job at Bowdoin. She recalled Thorne as a generous spirit and said his genuine passion and knack for investing greatly benefited the College. She also remembers him as a deeply personable and influential mentor.

“He was an amazing gentleman—sort of old-school,” said Volent. “I have all these beautiful handwritten notes he wrote to me on beautiful stationery that say thank you for something. He was just an amazing person.”

Thorne’s devotion to the College was unconditional and he never sought public recognition for his gifts. When the College was facing a dire financial situation under former President Robert Edwards and Dayton Arena’s refrigeration system broke, Thorne quietly paid for repairs. Edwards did not learn it was Thorne who had taken care of the hockey rink’s problem until months later.

Warren arrived at the College in 1965 and held a variety of responsibilities: director of Moulton Union, director of career counseling and placement and career services, coordinator of summer programs, secretary of the board of overseers and secretary of the College. Even after his retirement, Warren continued his involvement in the lives of many members of the Bowdoin community.

“[He was] a very gracious person [and] always made people feel comfortable. For many years he was secretary of the College which meant that he acknowledged gifts to the College with a personal handwritten note,” said Secretary of Development and College Relations John Cross ’76. “For a lot of people he was the point of contact once they graduated with what was going on at Bowdoin.”

Warren ran the job placement bureau at the College and liked to say that he got Stanley Druckenmiller ’75 his first “real” job—running the billiards room in Moulton Union.

Warren graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a accomplished football player. Although he did not attend Bowdoin, his dedication to the College is unquestionable. Warren and his wife Judith Dickson were always willing to open their home to students. They hosted international students during vacations and were known to drive students to the airport to make sure they made their flights.

“He’s just quite simply one of the great human beings of this world—a completely selfless person who just has connected with so many people,” said Dean of Student Affairs Tim Foster. “As you think about your own life you think about the number of people whose lives he’s touched in different ways.”

“The job that Harry did writing acknowledgement letters was the job that my father had done for 41 years, and then Harry did it, and now I’m doing that same job,” said Cross. “I do remember my father always said that there was only one other person he felt at Bowdoin who could do that job when he retired and it was Harry... He was very much an interpersonal contact person.”

Though they existed in two very different spheres of Bowdoin, both Warren and Thorne will be remembered for their selflessness, graciousness and quiet yet deep devotion to the college.

“All the stuff they did they didn’t do it thumping their chests; they did it because of this devotion and not to seek attention but because they felt it was the right thing to do and because they cared about other people,” said Foster. “In totally different ways, these are two giants of Bowdoin.”

Both of these longstanding pillars in  Bowdoin’s community embodied connection to place, one of the College’s key values. Their influence will remain  strong, as they leave behind legacies of kindness, humility and devotion to the common good. It is fitting that every day, Bowdoin students pass through places that carry their names: Thorne Hall and the Warren Dining Room in Moulton Union.

The Bowdoin Men’s Tennis Team capped off a record-breaking season with a resounding 5-0 victory over Middlebury in the NCAA Division III Championship. Wednesday's win at Kalamazoo College is the first national championship for the program, and the first title for a Bowdoin men’s team. The team took a 3-0 lead coming out of the doubles round and got a win from Co-Captain Luke Trinka ’16 before Middlebury player Hamid Derbani was unable to return the serve of Gil Roddy ’18, giving the Polar Bears the victory.

“It’s surreal. It’s not going to hit me and I don’t think it’s going to hit any of the guys for a while. It was just such an amazing moment, and for us, thinking nine months back in September when we made our goals, we knew we could be a good team, but no one on our team thought that a National Title was a certainty or anything like that,” said Co-Captain Chase Savage ’16. “We knew there was a lot of hard work ahead, but to be holding that trophy on Wednesday and to be surrounded by friends and family and to get all the support we got, it’s surreal.”

The win is especially cherished as Middlebury had defeated the Polar Bears twice before in this season, one of those times in the NESCAC final.

“For us to beat Middlebury in the national championship after they beat us twice this year, to be able to do it on the national stage is so special,” said Savage “They’re an unbelievable program, so for us to beat a team like that is just a little cherry on top of that ice cream sundae.”

Head Coach Conor Smith echoed Savage’s sentiments.

“It’s phenomenal. It makes things that much sweeter. It’s awesome to have won the national championship, and to have done it against Middlebury makes it just that much more epic,” he said. “They’re a team that has had our number for sure, not even just this year but the preceding years, last year they ended our year, so to be able to do it this year on this stage against them makes it that much better.”

Though no team expects to win a championship—doing so can all but guarantee a letdown—Bowdoin has had faith in their abilities the entire season. 

“You really trust the process and everything that has taken us here,” said Smith. “We weren’t really on anybody’s radar screens, which is fine, but the nine guys on the team, myself included, the ten of us, have known what we are capable of for a long time. It’s not a ridiculous shot to us.”

The team ended the year with a school record 20 wins and three losses. Smith attributes much of their success to the influence of the captains Savage and Trinka.

“Chase and Luke have been absolutely phenomenal leaders in so many ways, both on and off the court, doing a lot of the things that are not easy to do as leaders. You have to be so consistent every single day, showing up to practice and being that example, being that guy that everyone is kind of holding up on a pedestal,” he said. “[There are] things that are not always pleasant, not always fun, not easy, but if you want to be elite you have to do them. It’s one thing to have these things done and said by me and it’s a whole other to have their peers see [Savage and Trinka]. When the younger guys see that these guys are not just talking the talk but walking the walk, it goes way further than anything I could say or do.”

The respect and admiration flows both ways between the coach and players. Savage spoke highly of Smith, who was awarded the Wilson/ITA Division III Coach of the Year.

“He’s changed this program so much,” said Savage. “He’s recruited the right kids, and he’s recruited kids who love this program more than anything because he loves this program more than anything. He’s a special person, he’s one of the most influential people in my life and I know that all the other guys on the team would say the same thing, just in terms of how he conducts himself on and off the court, the type of role model he is. He’s a one of a kind person. I couldn’t imagine playing for another coach.”

Outside of the coach of the year award for Coach Smith, several other players received individual recognition. Savage was named the Northeast Region recipient of the ITA/Arthur Ashe Leadership and Sportsmanship Award, Trinka received the ITA Division III Most Improved Player and Luke Tercek ’18 was named the ITA Division Division III Player to Watch.

Both Savage and Smith played down the importance of their awards.

“The team stuff is so much more important to me quite honestly,” he said. “If the guys don’t do their job then none of that stuff comes. It’s way more about the guys and the team than any personal accolades, that doesn’t mean that much to me. It’s about the guys and their growth not only just as tennis players but as people, as men, that’s what I’m all about,” said Smith.

“It’s humbling. I think it’s more of a reflection of our team than on me. This is a really easy team to have been a co-captain on and we’ve had so many other contributors that have played an integral role,” said Savage. “I look at [the award] as further validation of the type of character that all nine guys on the team have.”

One year since the Meeting in the Union, the College has adopted and addressed many policies and practices in response to student concerns. However, an overarching sentiment exists among administrators and students that while progress is being made, it will be made slowly and there is still work to be done.

The meeting was a student-organized demonstration that took place February 13, 2015. It brought to the forefront several social justice issues that impact members of the Bowdoin community, as well as the intersectionality between those issues. After the meeting, an Open Letter to the Community was delivered to former president Barry Mills, outlining 19 calls to action regarding race and diversity on campus.

Race and diversity issues continue to permeate the lives of Bowdoin community members.  “Race is a dividing line in our society, on campuses across our country, and at Bowdoin. Those of color in our community experience Bowdoin differently than those who are white; the difference can be profound and occurs in every aspect of our lives here,” wrote President Clayton Rose in a December 3, 2015 campus-wide email. 

“It can be daunting—it’s a lot to take on,” said Associate Dean of Students for Diversity and Inclusion Leana Amaez. “We’re asking institutions that were built 200 years ago for a very different population to reimagine themselves, and that takes a lot of intentionality and examination of where are our traditions, where are our policies, where are our practices not meeting the needs of students today, where are they not reflecting the diversity of our world, where are they creating barriers to inclusion and equity.”

Amaez and the rest of the office of student affairs have been heavily involved in several efforts that directly address concerns raised in the open letter. Notably, additional programming during first-year orientation will specifically address race and bias; Bowdoin’s intergroup dialogue programming is expanding; and divisions of the College are adopting hiring and retention best practices in order to increase diversity among faculty and staff.

Residential Life (ResLife) has also taken steps towards educating their staff on how to facilitate conversations on difficult subjects by doubling the amount of training on race, gender and sexuality, as well as working with College House officers to improve the inclusivity and accessibility of College House programming. Additionally, ResLife has added a question specific to diversity to the College House application.

A year after the Meeting in the Union, the event continues to have a profound impact at the College, both on an institutional level and for many people individually.

“I think that was the first time I’ve really seen the activist boundaries being crossed in everyone working towards general betterment and getting many pieces together at once which I thought was really, really, cool,” said Maddie Lemal-Brown ’18. “I really liked the Meeting in the Union part; [it was] electrifying.”

One of the meeting organizers, Claudia Villar-Leeman ’15, had several negative racial experiences during her time at Bowdoin.

“For pretty much my entire Bowdoin career,” said Villar-Leeman, it felt [like the majority of campus] was either ignoring or kind of willfully oblivious to a lot of these issues because a lot of these issues are painful to talk about or uncomfortable to talk about.”

Participating in the event has allowed Villar-Leeman to now look back at her time at Bowdoin with positivity. 

“I was very encouraged that students were giving voice to their concerns in a really clear and powerful way, and that the message for me is that our students were really hurting as a result of the institution and its failures in certain places to live up to the Offer of the College,” said Amaez.

“That’s an important message, and an important check that can be hard to hear and sometimes painful, because I think my colleagues across the board are well-intentioned, they really care, so to hear that they might be might be missing the mark and that people might be in pain as a result is really hard, but really important for us as a community.”

Director of Residential Life Meadow Davis said that she has seen a shift in campus conversations towards topics of diversity.

 “A couple years ago it was all about alcohol, it was all about the hookup scene,” she said. “Now I’d say three quarters, a huge percentage, of people who are applying to ResLife are saying, ‘We need more conversations about diversity. We’ve had great conversations and we appreciate it—here’s how we want to do more.” 

Emily Jacques ’17, one of the organizers of the meeting, agreed, saying that she has seen a substantive change in campus discussions on race in the time since the meeting, both as a result of the meeting and other incidents.

“My first year you could avoid these sorts of conversations if you wanted to, but now it’s more present,” she said. “The stuff that’s been happening with locals in cars or the stuff on Yik Yak—I feel like the campus community is definitely more aware of various issues of injustice.” 

Dean of Student Affairs Tim Foster echoed Davis and Jacques’ sentiments.

 “[The meeting] was really about the notion of inclusion and what that means,” he said. “Do all members of our community feel that this place is theirs? And the answer to me was no, they don’t. That’s what we should aspire for. That means a ton of work, not work that we can do in a day or a week or a month, or a year, but over many years.”

But for students who only spend four years of their life at Bowdoin, this long-term institutional approach can be frustrating. Michelle Kruk ’16, one of the organizers of the meeting and an author of the letter spoke to these concerns. 

“I know that the College wants to be very thoughtful about the way that it’s handling certain issues, especially with race,” she said. “But I think that we’re capable of working on both a short-term solution and a long-term solution at the same time. I think that we have enough energy.”

Another organizer, Lemal-Brown, still believes that many discussions fail to reach the larger community in both academic and social settings.

“Last semester I know I was a little disappointed that my professors were not talking about race,” she said. “My [sociology and philosophy] classes were places where it should have been brought up.” 

“I know that I was very frustrated with the aftermath of the sailing party—meaning that Bowdoin still [falls back on] discussing things which tend to become conversations in closed rooms by separate groups,” Lemal-Brown said.

Ashmead White Director of Athletics Tim Ryan acknowledged the role athletics play in the racial climate on campus, both in its hiring and recruitment, and how the department addresses incidents such as the recent bias incidents involving the sailing and lacrosse teams.

“We certainly look at the events that have taken place and try to balance the learning opportunity,” he said. “Thinking about it along the lines of apologizing, educating and trying to leverage the learning opportunities associated with people making mistakes, then thinking about the ways in which we are able to positively impact the community. I think that approach was consistent in both the lacrosse and sailing incidents.” 

Ryan also said that athletics is placing an increased emphasis on diversity in recruiting both students and coaching staff.  

While the majority of the calls to action in the letter were accepted and acknowledged by College officials, some feel that there are certain demands that have not or should not be met.

For instance, following the meeting, members of Bowdoin Climate Action (BCA)—who played a large role in organizing the meeting—made a demand to former President Barry Mills to appoint a liaison to the Board of Trustees to communicate about the potential for divestment from fossil fuels. BCA does not feel their demand was adequately met, as Mills appointed himself the liaison, knowing he would be stepping down at the end of the year. 

“When we asked [the trustees] who to follow up with, as one does in official meetings, they shut us down and didn’t respond. Attempts after that to figure out how to move forward were similarly not moved forward,” said BCA member Allyson Gross ’16.

From an administrative standpoint, Foster disagreed with the necessity of a call to action that asked the college to “consider a student’s racial and socioeconomic background when making decisions about disciplinary action,” and “uphold consistent disciplinary policy for all students, regardless of parental interaction with the institution.”

“We try to consistently and thoughtfully uphold [community standards],” he said. “I think we do that, whether we’re dealing with the son or daughter of a trustee or whether we’re dealing with a first generation college student. I would say [we do] a very good job of being clear about our community standards and expectations and being thoughtful. I’ll stand behind the good work of the Judicial Board.”

The work of campus activists has not gone unnoticed by the administration, and the calls to action presented in the open letter have led to a real effort to shape the College into a place that is both diverse and inclusive. A year after the meeting, its message has not been forgotten.“Powerful,” said Davis. “That’s how I would sum it up.”​

The Entertainment Board (eBoard) announced Tuesday morning on their Facebook page on their Facebook page and in an email to campus that the Danish singer songwriter MØ will be headlining the 151st Ivies weekend.  

She will be performing on Saturday, April 30. The Thursday performer has yet to be announced.

MØ has gained recognition in the last year through her collaboration with the DJ and producer Major Lazer in his song “Lean On.” “Lean On” is currently the most streamed song of all time on Spotify, with over 600 million plays. MØ has also worked with Iggy Azalea and Avicii, among others.

This will be the third major concert to take place at Bowdoin this year—Guster visited the campus in October, and Børns will be performing a sold-out show in Pickard theater on February 5.

“We talked a lot this year on the board about bringing someone up and coming, that was one of our goals,” said Emily Serwer ’16, the co-head of eBoard. “Because our budget is so limiting I know it’s difficult for people to understand the type of artist that we can bring based on our budget, but we thought it would be exciting to bring someone that has been recently coming out with music that’s been doing well, who’s been doing collaborations, that there’s been a lot of buzz around.”

The Ivies news came a day after the tickets for the February 5th BØRNS concert were completely sold out in around four hours. Students lined up around Smith Union to buy tickets starting at 9 a.m., and though the line had dissipated within an hour, the tickets were gone by the end of the day. 

Serwer said the eBoard did not expect the show to sell out so quickly, though it did need to fill all the seats in Pickard Theater to break even on the concert. 

“It was really incredible,” said Serwer. “We were anticipating selling tickets up until the day of the show, really pushing and advertising, and they sold out within, I believe, four hours.” 

There has been some frustration among the student body that the concert is being held in Pickard and not all students who wanted tickets were able to get them. 

“I was frustrated because I had class in the morning and didn’t realize they would run out that fast,” said Dana Williams ’18, who did not get a ticket. “It would have been really great if they put it in the Union.”

In the past, musical acts such as Murs and Racer X have performed in Smith Union, but Serwer said that due to the necessity of ticketing, Pickard and Kresge were the only possible venues. Pickard Theater holds 600 people while Kresge Auditorium only seats 300. 

The decision to bring BØRNS to campus came after feedback from students and the College asking for more exciting programming around winter weekend. 

“We came to up with the idea that if we pooled together all our funds from winter weekend, if we move our budget around a little from other items, we’d be able to afford a pretty cool act, as long as we did ticketing,” said Serwer. “BØRNS was really up and coming, had a lot of buzz on iTunes and Spotify, on music websites, and music press was talking a lot about him and his band, so when that name came up, he was the first choice unanimously on the board.”

There is no truth to the rumor that the seats will be removed for the concert. The Pickard seats are currently out due to construction, but will be returned for the show. 

The theater department has requested extra security in anticipation of intoxicated students dirtying the theater and standing on seats during the concert.

Bowdoin Dining Services purchases and receives a startling amount of food every week. According to Associate Director of Dining Kenneth Cardone, Bowdoin serves 23-24 thousand meals per week, consuming a quantity of meat, fish, produce, fruit and dry goods that weighs thousands of pounds.

 To provide such a huge quantity of food, Bowdoin relies on a range of suppliers. Sourcing and Menu Manager Matt Caiazzo said that approximately 80 percent of the total food purchases are from the Performance Food Group (PFG) NorthCenter distribution facility in Augusta, Maine. 

PFG supplies Bowdoin with an enormous range of products. Almost all meat that is not ground beef comes from PFG, as do eggs, non-milk dairy products, dry pantry goods, fruit besides apples and many paper products and supplies. PFG is a satellite location of a national distribution company that contracts with some of the biggest players in the food industry including Tyson, Kraft and ConAgra among others.

 The other 20 percent of the food budget is spent at a variety of mid-sized sources. Bubier Meats, in Greene, Maine supplies primal cuts of locally raised beef that Bowdoin grinds in a meat cutting room in Thorne Dining Hall. All of Bowdoin’s ground beef is local and ground in-house. Bowdoin sometimes buys processed meat from GoodSource Solutions, a California based company that purchases discounted surplus product from industrial processers immediately after a client discontinues an item or changes its production specifications. 

 PJ Merril Seafood and Harbor Fish, both based in Portland, Maine, as well as Maine Shellfish Company from Kennebunk, Maine provide Bowdoin with seafood, much of which is caught off the Maine coast. Each company is a small distributor with national connections. 

Similarly, Bowdoin’s farm produce comes from multiple sources. In addition to a small amount of produce from the Bowdoin Organic Garden, Dining also purchases from the Crown O’ Maine Organic Cooperative and Farm Fresh Connection, both aggregators and distributors of produce from small to midsize producers in Maine.

While Cardone and Caiazzo identified these businesses as suppliers to Bowdoin, they were unable to provide any information about the respective quantity of food purchased from each. Bowdoin’s Controller’s Office was also unable to provide any information about payments to each vendor.

In recent years, awareness about the provenance of food has increased significantly, as has awareness of the steep external cost that many methods of food production carry. The cost is manifested in harsh conditions for migrant farm workers, as well as in the outsized environmental impact of the industrial livestock industry, which accounts for 15 percent of global carbon emissions. 

This cost also appears in the ecosystem-damaging runoff of chemical fertilizer and pesticides from croplands not to mention the public heath threat posed by widespread antibiotic and hormone use in animal feed.

Others have taken issue with cruel and inhumane treatment of animals, including confining pregnant and nursing sows in gestation crates and confining laying hens in battery cages. The widespread use of genetically modified organisms (G.M.O.s) in the food system has also become a target for activist consumers, though there is not yet a definitive consensus that they pose any risk to consumers.

The food system is so complex and opaque that it is nearly impossible to understand and account for all of its externalities. For instance, an Associated Press investigation recently found that slavery is widespread the Thai fishing industry, which supplies fish to many large retailers and distributors in the U.S. and Europe. 

Some of the food Bowdoin serves avoids the external costs of the industrial food system but Bowdoin may be guilty of complicity with many of these practices. PFG supplies antibiotic and hormone free meat but it is unclear how much of it Bowdoin buys.  

“I think a lot of the products we purchase are antibiotic free,” said Caiazzo. 

Caiazzo was unable to provide the Orient with any data about which and how many products are free of the drugs. 

With respect to chicken, Bowdoin may soon benefit from shifts by some of the market’s biggest players. McDonalds recently announced that it will begin to limit antibiotics in its chicken over the next two years. 

“[McDonalds] is changing the industry, because they have such tremendous buying power and that’s good for us,” said Cardone.

One of the most difficult aspects of sourcing is deciding which factors are important and balancing costs. Almost any alternative to the industrial food system comes at a higher cost. A primary benefit of organic farming is that for crops, organic certification places limits on the use of potentially harmful synthetic fertilizer and pesticides. However, many chemicals can still be used, as long as they’ve been deemed ‘essential,’ by the USDA. According to Cardone, Bowdoin occasionally buys organic foods, but they are not a priority. The PFG order guide shows an availability of some organic produce but not a significant amount.

“Organic isn’t on top of the list—local’s on top of the list,” said Cardone. “Some products that we buy are organic but that’s not what we’re focusing on, we’re focusing on local.”

Buying locally produced food has become one of the most well-known and effective ways to avoid the external costs of the industrial food system. According to the Bowdoin Dining Services website, “Bowdoin sources approximately 34 percent of food purchases from local vendors.” Caiazzo said this percentage is calculated as a percentage of the dining services budget. The primary items included in this calculation are ground beef, milk, some seafood, apples, tomatoes and some produce.

However, buying locally in Maine is not easy. 

“You always want to be able to plan to use more local food as it becomes available,” said Cardone. “The issue in Maine is that it’s very seasonal, so you need the ability to process and store [food].”

The local food economy in Maine is not large or diverse enough to support Bowdoin entirely. Many farms are simply too small. Even if a farmer is able to produce enough livestock to satisfy Bowdoin’s high demand, all of that meat has to be processed. While meat production in Maine has increased, a lack of meat processing facilities in the region has hindered significant growth of the market. According to Cardone, some producers in Maine have shipped their cattle out of state to be processed then shipped back. At that point, its financial and environmental costs rise dramatically. 

“Think about the volume,” said Cardone. “We used 30,000 chicken breasts from March to the end of April. Think about the state of Maine and these small farms that produce poultry and pork. They’re raising 15 hogs—it’s just not there yet.”

Farm size, the short growing season and greater cost are the three biggest obstacles to local sourcing in Maine. 

“A lot of it depends on the season, a lot if it is market driven,” Cardone said. “If we get an opportunity to jump on something, we watch it closely; we’re going to do that. You have to.”

Caiazzo said that in the future, he hopes to work with local farms before the growing season so that farms can match their production to Bowdoin’s needs and specifications. 

“[We hope to] look at ways we can work with local growers and farmers to help grow their businesses,” he said. “Because they need to scale up to be able to provide to us at a reasonable cost and if we don’t do anything about it, they’ll never hit that next scale.”

Bowdoin currently freezes some local produce at its peak availability and lowest cost in the summertime, but Caiazzo hopes to do more of this in the future. This could significantly increase the amount of local produce and even seafood that Bowdoin uses, however Dining is  limited by a lack of freezer space. 

“There isn’t a food service that I know that food storage isn’t an issue,” said Cardone.

Dining is also faced with the difficulty of what to do when student tastes and ethics collide. For example, bananas are Bowdoin’s most popular fruit, with Dining bringing in around 51,000 pounds every year. However, Bowdoin Amnesty has recently been bringing discussion of the problems surrounding the harvesting of bananas in South and Central America to campus. Caiazzo confirmed that Bowdoin’s bananas are from that area. Cardone said it would be very difficult to stop offering the fruit because of its popularity.

“It’s a matter of educating your customer base,” he said. “Eat an apple, eat a pear. They’re local. It’s a juggle and it’s a balancing act.”

Despite the difficulty and complexity, Cardone said that Dining works hard to stay responsive to student’s requests and current food trends. 

“It’s a changing landscape,” he said. “What we did last year doesn’t work this year and what we’re doing this year won’t work next year. You can’t sit on your laurels.”

Student opinion and conviction about sourcing ranges, but many seem to be aware of local and organic foods in Bowdoin’s dining halls. However, at the end of the day, everyone has to eat. “I always pay close attention to when it is local or organic,” said Alice Jones ’17. “But it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m more inclined to eat it.”“[I] wish we knew more about where we get meat and things like that,” said Kayla Kaufman ’18. 

“What could be cool is a little bit more transparency or a little bit more knowledge of sneaky things that have huge carbon footprints,” said Clare McLaughlin ’15. “For example, things like almonds are just not good for the environment but we don’t think about that and no one talks about that and it’s not advertised.”

McLaughlin added that she thinks sourcing could be more sustainable if Dining used its resources more effectively. 

“I think you could decrease the extravagance on some things to make other things more sustainable,” she said. 

Bowdoin Dining’s massive operation is one of the most well-known aspects of the College, and making food on such a large scale is no easy task. 

For Mariette Aborn ’17, studying abroad runs in the family. Aborn’s mother, uncle, older sister and younger brother all spent time overseas during high school. Though Aborn was unable to take time off to go away during high school, she knew that studying abroad was an experience she wanted before she started college.

That being the case, Aborn spent the fall semester after her high school graduation in Porrentruy, Switzerland, where she lived with a host family and attended Collège St Charles, a small, private Catholic school with only 18 students in each grade. 

“I didn’t hesitate to take another year to figure out where I was going,” she said about choosing her destination.

Going to a new school, Aborn noted that while her new school in Switzerland was very strong in math and science, and had many foreign language programs, it differed from U.S. schools in that there was little emphasis on literary analysis.

“When I was there, [students] wrote their first essay analyzing literature which was a big deal to them, and that to me was very surprising,” said Aborn. “I did it all wrong, I guess, because I [titled the paper] ‘Stairway,’ and I had this metaphor that went all throughout it and they laughed at me and said that was completely wrong—that’s not how you’re supposed to do it.”Aborn also said schools in Switzerland differed from schools in the U.S. because all of the students she attended school with were already on a direct track college. 

“In Switzerland they sort of weed out before you get to high school who’s actually going to college, so that decision is already made very early on. All of the students in the high school that I was at were destined for college,” she said. “In the U.S. it’s different because you’re still all together. They have different schools: trade schools, vocational schools, and it’s figured out by grade six whether or not you’re on that track.”

Thus, unlike her peers in Switzerland, for Aborn, going to school in another country during her gap year was an opportunity to let go of some of her earlier focus on academics and spend time getting to know her peers and speaking to them in French. 

“When I was in Switzerland, I saw it as an opportunity to not be the goody two-shoes I was in high school,” she said. “So I wasn’t a model student.” 

Along the way, Aborn also experienced some cultural misunderstandings—often in the classroom. 

“I got in trouble with the teachers because I always had a water bottle in class and they always were telling me that ‘this was not a room of picnic,’” she said. 

After her fall semester, Aborn returned home to Manchester, Vt. to finish out her gap year, where she worked in a shoe store to earn money for college and had a social media internship at a nonprofit. Aborn said it was strange being back at home after graduating from high school and going abroad.

“Everyone in my town thought I had dropped out of college,” she said. “I definitely was interacted with in a different way because I was this person who had graduated high school and was back in town. I very much suffered some odd questions and dirty looks.”

Though she was nervous about returning to rigorous academics after her year was over, Aborn said she was glad she decided to take the year off. 

“I was very much nervous about writing papers again because I hadn’t written a real paper for a long time,” she said. “I was very grateful for my first-year seminar opportunity to write again and really focus on those skills.”

She said the biggest difference she noticed upon arriving at Bowdoin after a gap year was that she had already adjusted to life after high school. She had been away from her high school friends for a year, and grown apart from them more compared to some of her friends who were still more connected. 

“A year out, you talk to the people you want to talk to. But when you go home it’s like you never left,” said Aborn. “I was already at that point, [but] all of my friends here were still very much connected to their high school friends and talking to them throughout their first couple months of college.”

Now a sophomore, Alborn is settled into Bowdoin but has plans to go abroad again next year, this time to France. She will continue her language studies and hopefully become fluent in French. 

Making a good impression on prospective students in the midst of one of the coldest winters in recent memory may be a daunting task, but Bowdoin’s Office of Admissions is up to the challenge. 

While some schools may be able to provide friendlier climates, Bowdoin has come up with a unique offering of its own—a sense of humor.For the last few weeks, Admissions has adopted a Hawaiian theme. Snow-covered tiki torches and beach chairs grace what is left of the front lawn, and tour guides have been donning Hawaiian shirts from Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Scott Meiklejohn’s personal collection. 

Admissions has also installed a hot chocolate bar, over which a banner reads, “It’s Snow Big Deal.”

“Admissions was concerned that visitors coming to Brunswick would be a little bit scared away by our harsh weather conditions,” said Head Tour Guide Adrienne Chistolini ’15. “They wanted to do some sort of visually pleasing campaign to make jokes out of it and show that we’re really lighthearted and optimistic people at Bowdoin.”

The “Hawaiian Shirt Campaign,” has garnered a fair amount of attention, with WMTW, the local ABC affiliate, picking up the story last week. 

Michelle Johnson ’15, was interviewed by an WMTW news crew.

“That was kind of an accident. The news was coming during my tour slot and [the other tour guides] picked me because last semester I was the assistant head tour guide,” she said. “They gave me about an hour warning and were like, ‘Be camera ready!’ and I was very unshowered and had just come from volunteering at a preschool, and I was like, ‘Whatever, I can work with this!’”

Chistolini and Johnson feel the program has been a success. Both said that prospective students and their families have been, at the very least, amused by Admissions’ latest antics, and anything that helps Bowdoin stand out must be considered a positive.

“[The campaign shows that] we can make light of a potentially very dismal and depressing situation,” said Chistolini. “Hopefully it makes us stand out on their long college tours as a school that’s a little bit different, a little bit kooky but in a funny way.”

Even in late February, Bowdoin has many more weeks of snow to look forward to, and as it continues to trudge through the winter, one thing can be certain: Admissions will not allow a little snow to become a big deal. 

Whether they are reshelving books at the library, serving their peers in the dining halls or setting up for sporting events, student workers are a visible and essential part of campus life. Upwards of 70 percent of the student body is employed on campus, and this fall, the College filled 1,835 job openings spread across 80 departments and offices. The largest student employers are, in order, the Department of Athletics, Dining Services, the Center for Learning and Teaching, Admissions and the Library. 

Students apply for most on-campus jobs online through the Student Employment Office (SEO) website. However, some departments, including Athletics, do most of their hiring internally.

“The majority of students that work at our games are connected with the coaches that oversee our game management operations for each sport,” wrote Ashmead White Director of Athletics Tim Ryan in an email to the Orient. “For example, our men’s basketball assistant coach oversees our men’s soccer game management, and the students that chase balls at the games are members of our men’s basketball team.  This isn’t always the case, but it is our most consistent approach.”

Ryan added that he also reaches out to College House leaders in the beginning of the year to request student workers and has accepted students who contact him directly with an interest in working at various athletic events. 

First Year Job PlacementWhen first years arrive on campus, they have two options for finding a job: applying directly to job postings on the SEO website, or using the First Year Job Placement Program.  

While an individual search could yield more flexibility, many job openings are already filled by the time first years are ready to start looking for employment. The First Year Job Placement Program offers less control but more stability. Incoming students answer survey questions about their skills and experience and agree to accept whatever position the SEO assigns them. Most of these jobs are in Dining Services. 

The SEO tries to match students’ skills to potential jobs, but placements are mainly determined by the order in which students submit their applications and whether or not they receive financial aid. 

Not every student who enters the placement program receives a job.

“This year we were able to offer positions to everybody who participated in the process,” said Assistant Director of Financial Aid and Student Employment Sarah Paul. “That doesn’t happen every year. Typically we run out of openings and there are certain students on the list that don’t get a placement.”

Types of workStudent work varies greatly from department to department, which suits the different interests of student workers, according to Paul.

“[Some] students want to have professional development opportunities, to be able to work in positions that allow them to move forward professionally after Bowdoin, and some students want to have positions where they can just kind of come, be in a job for a period of time and move on,” she said. 

Sam Canales ’15 works for athletics as a ball boy for women’s soccer in the fall, and in the winter he runs the game clock and scoreboard for men’s hockey. Canales said that the jobs rarely feel like a burden to him. 

“It doesn’t really feel like I’m at work,” he said. “Because a lot of times I would have gone to the games anyway and I’m working with a lot of my friends, so it makes it easier.” 

In the dining halls, shifts are busy and students are almost always hard at work. 

“You have to admit that dining jobs are very different than being the [card swiper] at [The Peter Buck Center for Health and Fitness],” said Dining Services Associate Director of Operations Michele Gaillard. “I see them and they have their studying or their reading or whatever, and that’s not the dining jobs. For some kids that’s absolutely a deal breaker because they have to study or they don’t want to work the way our students work.”

Dining hall managers like Carolina Deifelt Streese ’16 said that even as students move up in rank in Dining Services, the workload and the length of shifts do not decrease. Not only do managers supervise other student employees, they also monitor the dining area and constantly evaluate what needs to be replaced and restocked. Manager shifts also include a lot of clean-up, and run longer than many other shifts.

“My brunch shift has run to six and a half hours during the week that Thorne was closed and we had to serve brunch to everybody,” said Deifelt Streese. “Other jobs you can negotiate your shift a little bit but these—you need to be here for the entire [shift].”

Other campus jobs require a certain level of training or background experience. 

Students must apply to become writing assistant’s at the Center for Learning and Teaching (CLT), for instance, and enroll in an education course that teaches them the skills necessary for being a successful tutor. 

Noorissa Khoja ’15 works as a quantitative reasoning tutor at the CLT, helping students to understand concepts or complete problem sets for economics and math courses. Each night presents a different set of challenges for Khoja based on what students need help with, but she said that her work is very rewarding.

“I really enjoy teaching others,” Khoja said. “I think it’s cool because I learn a lot of things too and figure out what I know and don’t know about my [economics] major, which is kind of interesting.”

How pay is determinedIn Maine, the hourly minimum wage is $7.50 per hour, but  student workers at Bowdoin are paid no less than $7.75 per hour. Two main factors determine how much a student gets paid. The first is how long they have worked in their department. Students who stay with the same employer are typically rewarded with small pay increases at the end of each semester or year. 

The second factor is the level of technical skill and knowledge required for the jobs. 

The SEO has developed five pay bands—A, B, C, D and E—for starting salaries based on student skill level, level of independence  necessary and task complexity. The breakdowns for these levels can be found on the SEO website. 

The SEO supports supervisors in determining pay grades for the jobs they post. 

“Student positions that require more technical skills, like having specific video editing skills or information technology or specific research knowledge, that’s where you see the pay scale increasing,” said Paul. “The other piece is level of independence in terms of [supervision required] to accomplish the job duties.”

According Ryan, all jobs in the athletics department fall into pay grade A—the lowest paying category. Not many students with jobs in the department are upset by their low hourly wages.

“It’s very mindless labor and I don’t mind doing it so I think I’m fairly compensated for it,” said Canales. 

For others, pay rates can be frustrating. Students who are employed with Dining Services and have very busy shifts sometimes feel shortchanged. Line servers fall into the B pay grade and are paid $8.25 an hour.

“When you’re just starting out as a line server, I think it’s a little bit unfair because you’re getting paid the same as somebody who’s swiping cards at the gym, so that can be kind of crummy,” said  Deifelt Streese. “But [with the raises] for managers I think it’s fair.”Braedon Kohler ’18, a current line server, agreed. 

“It’s not that I don’t like this [job], but with college being such a work-heavy time, having some sort of job where I could sit behind a desk and do work or just goof off and get paid the same amount would be cool,” he said. “I’d rather do less and get paid the same.”

Performance evaluationThe evaluation process for student workers is highly dependent on supervisors taking initiative. 

The SEO’s online evaluation form is not widely used, and the office hopes to initiate further conversation about student performance evaluation in the future.

For Paul and the rest of the SEO, the main purpose of evaluation is to determining how to make students more comfortable in their jobs, even in cases where a student might not be doing their job well, or not showing up for his or her shift.

“This is a learning environment for students. It may be a student’s first job, so supervisors in general are very thoughtful with checking in with students if they’re having challenges,” said Paul. “We have very few terminations that happen. All of the termination conversations that I’ve had have been very positive with supervisors and they have resulted in most cases with students staying in their jobs.”

Paul said her goal is to set up Bowdoin as a training ground for students’ future job experiences. 

“Down the road students are going to have to negotiate salaries, they’re going to have to understand their benefits, so anything we can do here as an educational tool for students is my aim in particular,” she said. “If students are coming back to me and saying, ‘This is a challenge,’ that is always positive feedback. Where we run into trouble as a society, as a work community, as an educational institution, is when feedback is not happening.”

For many students, on-campus jobs offer opportunities to learn skills and gain experiences they would not otherwise have acquired. 

“I like my job—I’ve met some cool people and getting to know how the food industry works is also kind of cool. The chefs have actually had me bread tofu nuggets and I’ve done stuff that I never thought I’d do in my life,” said Kohler. “I’ve also met some people randomly at College House parties—they’ll be like ‘You’re the guy who gave me a couple extra nuggets. I like you.’”

Jae-Yeon Yoo ’18 understands better than most what it means to care for someone. During her gap year she worked in a residential community for people with special needs located in Gorey, Ireland—about two hours south of Dublin.

Yoo worked with an international organization named Camphill Communities to assist 25 members of the residential community, which is divided into small houses. She lived in a house with a host mother and four people with special needs.

Each day, Yoo would wake up and either milk the community’s farm animals, or shower one of the members. Her house family would then cook, eat and clean up breakfast together. After breakfast, everyone would go off to workshops—including pottery, weaving and other activities designed to have the community create something together. 

In the morning, Yoo would work in the weavery, and in the afternoon, she would clean with the help of some special needs members of the community.

“Because it’s an entirely self-functioning community, you don’t have people from the outside, like our housekeepers, that come in and do it,” said Yoo. “I got to be really good friends with our vacuum and toilet cleaner.” 

Yoo took valuable lessons away from her gap year, but the transition to Bowdoin, and back to living only for herself, has presented challenges. 

“I think the main thing [the gap year] helped me to realize is how valuable it is to care for another person and to be fully responsible for someone else,” she said. “I had four people who were getting me up in the morning, and now I only have to be responsible for myself. That’s really relieving in the beginning but at the same time you feel a little bit empty. I’m still dealing with that.”

Yoo’s experience was also meaningful as it gave her a chance to get to know socially marginalized people. 

“I think people should realize that special needs people really aren’t very different from us,” she said. “People, when they hear about my gap year, always say, ‘oh my god, you’re such a good person, that’s amazing,’ but I think I gained more from the experience than what I was able to give them. I discovered a lot about myself.”

Yoo found through working with the other residents of the community that the similarities between everyone living there outweighed the differences. She said that recontextualizing what seems like odd behavior in terms of ones own life can help that understanding. 

Yoo pointed out that we all desire a certain order in our lives, and while the reaction of a severely autistic person to a change in routine might be different from others, the root cause, a need for stability, is shared. 

“If you think about it in those terms it’s really important that they’re not that different,” she said. “I think a lot of people forget that when they hear about my experience. I am far from being an angel.”

Yoo said she has enjoyed returning to her studies after taking a year off from academics. However, she did learn to drink beer with the correct Irish technique.

“I didn’t do any studying unless you count learning how to drink Guinness,” she said. “That was a serious lesson.”

For as long as I can remember, dance has been a part of my life. My parents are both musically inclined, so naturally there was always music playing in my house. Even when I was very small, I was always moving to that music—or maybe it was moving me. 

When I was five and a half, my parents decided it was time to find me some different, better-equipped walls to bounce off—maybe in a place where my exuberance wouldn’t lead to broken glass—and signed me up for dance classes at a local studio. So began my now 14 year-old love affair with dance.

At the studio, it became clear to my instructors very quickly that I was not going to tolerate any horseplay. After a brief stint in some kind of “dance for five-year-olds” class, I moved into a class of all boys. Though I loved (and still love) moving fast and big—something that we did a lot of in this class—I wanted no part in any of the goofing-off that my fellow seven-year-old boy dancer friends were so fond of. My instructors moved me out of that class, and into a more traditional ballet class, comprised of mostly girls. I never looked back.

Through high school, I was a ballet dancer. As I grew up, those elementary school kids in that first ballet class became some of my better friends. We spent hundreds of hours together, during rehearsals and classes that ranged from feeling excruciatingly long to blink-and-you’ve-missed-it short, I’m pretty sure that in my junior and senior years of high school I spent more time with these people than anyone else (including my family). Together we learned to trust each other, take risks together and perform together. Our relationships extended beyond the studio, so when it came time to leave after graduation, it’s no wonder we were all crying.

After I graduated, I couldn’t really imagine dancing with different people. I knew so much about the dancers I grew up with. I knew how they moved, their tendencies, where they needed support in partnering, where they were strong, which way they usually fell while turning. Knowing this information helped us to work together as a team, and helped me to improve as an individual. 

I was so used to this intimate level of knowledge that finding a new group of people to dance with seemed intensely daunting. I knew it could never be the same. 

My graduating class’s final performance together, our individual farewell solos and our subsequent goodbyes to the teachers who had played such a huge part in our lives, had a note of beautiful, bittersweet finality, and I didn’t quite feel comfortable messing with that. To be entirely honest, I wasn’t sure if I would dance again.

I didn’t dance the summer after high school. When I arrived at Bowdoin, I explored the idea of joining a dance club but never actually got involved. They weren’t really doing what I was interested in, and I honestly wasn’t committed enough to dance to invest the time. 

I tried other things, kept somewhat active and thought I was doing fine. So imagine my surprise when I discovered I had a space in my schedule spring semester and the thought of taking dance again filled me with overwhelming joy—so began the next phase of my life as a dancer.

My dance experience at Bowdoin has been very different from my time in high school. Back then, the work I was doing focused mostly on performance. I did very little choreography, and though I found creative expression through the steps that others choreographed for me, I had little influence over what I did. Here, I am beginning to explore my ability to create.

Even in the intense academic environment that Bowdoin fosters, the hardest thing I do here is choreography. The amount of insecurity and self-questioning that goes into making performance art is ridiculous—sometimes I wonder why I even bother. I want to make things that look good, but I don’t want to pander to my audience. I want to make things that I like to do, but I want to reach people as well.

But what do I struggle with the most? Believing that the work I do deserves to exist. The dance world is filled with incredible work, and to believe that I have a shot at making something that has a place there is not easy. It takes a kind of arrogance to honestly think that your art is meaningful and important, yet it takes intense self-criticism and reflection to make anything good. 

Artists of other mediums understand, I’m sure, but my dance is made even more vulnerable by the fact that right now I am choreographing for myself. I have to literally stand and answer for my work every time it is shown. There is no hiding.

I don’t know how dance fits into my future, but I know that I am not satisfied. The thought that I may have walked away from dance after high school is now horrifying. There is something deeply meaningful in movement, and I do not feel I have come close enough to figuring out what that is for me to stop. 

As the end of college approaches, I, like any artist, am encountering more and more pressure to set myself up for a career—something I always assumed would not involve dance. But now I’m not so sure. When I first walked into a dance studio, something happened, and it’s still happening today. I don’t know if I will ever really be able to stop.  

In an effort to improve the College’s concussion education program, Associate Director of Health Promotion Whitney Hogan and Director of Athletic Training Dan Davies met with a group of student athletes yesterday. The meetin gave Hogan and Davies an opportunity to hear students’ thoughts on the effectiveness of the College’s current concussion education programs and to hear their suggestions for the future of the program. 

A group of upperclassmen were selected to participate in the meeting from sports teams that may be more susceptible to concussions. Though all student athletes participate in a concussion education program every fall, the athletic department is always looking for ways to keep the material fresh and relevant.

“My hope for the meeting is that if we decide to do any additional education it can be student-driven and student-directed,” said Hogan. “It will depend on what the students want.”

Evan Fencik ’17, a member of the women’s soccer team, attended the meeting. Prior to the meeting, she discussed suggestions for improvement in the way the College educates athletes in the treatment and prevention of concussions. 

In high school, Fencik worked closely with Chris Nowinski, the founder of Sports Legacy Institute—a non-profit focusing on treatment and prevention of head trauma in athletes—and a former professional wrestler. She would like to apply some of the things she learned working with Nowinski to improving concussion education at Bowdoin. Fencik would also like the College to work on bringing Nowinski to Bowdoin as a speaker and to screen the documentary “Head Games.”

All Bowdoin athletes undergo baseline impact testing before being cleared to play. These tests are used as reference points when determining when it is safe for athletes to return to full activity. Students are required to return to full academic activity before returning to athletics. 

While Fencik believes that the Bowdoin Athletic Department does a good job treating students with concussions and helping them recover, she believes they could improve on their prevention programing.

“I think it’s great that we have the education, and it’s pretty informative,” said Fencik. “But it’s just not presented in a way that really shakes athletes and lets them know that concussions are a very serious issue.”

This meeting also comes on the heels of a larger NCAA initiative, which has made several grants available to colleges for the purpose of promoting concussion education on their campuses. Ashmead White Director of Athletics Tim Ryan said that while determining ways to expand concussion education with the help of an NCAA grant is one of the goals of the meeting, the discussion will be very much driven by what students want to see from the education.

“We’re not going into this with any preconceived thoughts,” said Ryan. “It’s more an opportunity for us to meet and talk with students and gather their feedback with the hope of being able to enhance our educational programming.”

The number of concussions on athletic teams have been relatively consistent for the last three years, going from 62 in 2011-12 to 69 in 2012-13 and 60 in 2013-14. Concussions are an issue for all athletic teams, not just the ones typically associated with concussions. The 60 concussions in 2014 were spread over 17 different athletic teams.  

Ryan also said that he recognizes that concussions are a challenge for all students on campus, not only student athletes. 

“A lot of our education has been focused on student athletes,” said Ryan. “[But] it’s an issue that impacts everyone on campus. The more education we can do in the community, the better off we’re going to be.”

Several years ago, housekeeper Karen Brownlee received a call: someone had accidentally sprayed a fire extinguisher in Helmreich House. 

“We walked in and it was just covered—the entire building,” she said, “and the weekend people had to go in and clean it up.” 

The difficulty of the work the support staff does is not always recognized. From fire extinguisher rampages, to defecation in mop buckets, to students moving into laundry rooms, Bowdoin support staff truly has the College’s back. Cleaning chemical guides must be followed precisely; bleachers are not easy to move. 

Brownlee, who has worked at the College for five years, said the difficulty can take new hires by surprise.

“I think people see it as ‘Oh, it’s just housekeeping,’ and then they’re like, ‘Shit, it’s pretty hardcore,”’ she said.

The College employs around 380 support staff working in areas like housekeeping, security, dining, facilities, grounds and academic support. These employees are essential, and many say the College provides excellent compensation and benefits. 

Despite Bowdoin’s attractive working environment, as with any workplace, it is not entirely conflict free. 

Employees can bring concerns to Human Resources (HR), or to a variety of other programs. Though Director of Human Resources Tama Spoerri said that the first person an employee should talk to is their supervisor, HR knows other outlets are necessary.

All budgeted full time equivalent (FTE) employees of the College who work at least 20 hours a week during the academic year on a set schedule are eligible for the benefits package.Workers who are not full time employees of the College—like those who are brought in to replace a person on sick leave or extra security guards hired for busy weekends with large events—are not eligible for the benefits package.

The standard benefits package for employees includes medical coverage, dental coverage, vacation time, sick time, and a retirement plan that kicks in after one year of employment as long as the employee is over the age of 26. The Human Resources department added vision coverage to the benefits package a few years ago.

The disability plan for hourly workers used to be different than that of salary workers, but the HR department changed the program this year to make it standard among all employees.

In the past, hourly workers had to choose between either paying for a disability plan that would kick in after 15 days of missing work or having a disability plan that was free, but pay only kicked in after 60 days of missing work. That system was eliminated earlier this year. Now the disability plan is free and pay kicks in after 15 days of missing work due to a disability.

The College also changed the long-term disability program earlier this year.

Long-term disability payments kick in after 25 weeks of being unable to work. Employees used to receive payments equal to 60 percent of their base pay, but this amount was taxed. Employees received lower payments than they expected so the HR department decided to make the payment equal to 60 percent of the employee’s base pay without tax reductions.

The HR department has made changes to benefit plans in response to legitimate concerns raised by employees, situations that highlight flaws in the plans, or recommendations from the Benefits Advisory Committee.

Presently, Bowdoin does not have any independent labor organizations. Security officers were unionized until the 1990s, when they voted to decertify. Spoerri said she hasn’t recently heard desire for unionization from any staff at the College.

“When I first got here, there was a little bit of chatter about [unionization],” said grounds crew worker Mike Grim, who has worked at the College for eight years. He said the consensus was that organizing was not a very realistic idea. 

“We do have a couple of people on our crew who are really gung-ho about it,” said Daniel Kimmick, another housekeeper. “I wouldn’t personally do a union, because I think we would lose a lot of benefits that Bowdoin gives us.”

Despite the fact that Maine is an at-will employment state—employees can be fired without cause or advance notice—Spoerri said that the issues leading to the last unionization discussion were resolved through internal communication and without any disciplinary action.

“People feel they have pretty good working conditions—they’re fairly paid and have good benefits,” said Spoerri.

Kimmick said, “I’ve learned not to mess with something that’s good.”

The Support Staff Advocacy Committee (SSAC) is one organization on campus that helps represent Bowdoin staff both within their workplace and to the administration. The SSAC works with HR and other on-campus resources to be a representative voice for support staff. The SSAC also puts on events and works on community building. The overall goal of the SSAC is to make sure support staff are able to take advantage of everything Bowdoin has to offer.

In some regards, the SSAC comes close to filling the role of a union, but as an organization heavily intertwined with the HR department, it is distinct from an independent labor union advocating on behalf of workers at the College. However, Grim, member of the committee, said that when there is conflict, the SSAC is able to work in a way similar to that of a theoretical union in that it advocates for workers.

“I look at the SSAC the same as a union organization,” Grim said. “Ideas are presented that could help the workers, it’s taken up the chain, and we work with management to see if it can fly.”

“I call it a quality-of-life program for our workers,” he added. 

Rosie Armstrong, program coordinator for the Environmental Studies department and co-chair of the SSAC, said that the SSAC was founded to ensure staff could address their concerns.

“It was a way to give support staff voice so that problems didn’t fester,” said Armstrong. “If people were frustrated, there was an avenue of communication with administration.”

One of the most popular events that the SSAC puts on is the annual lunch with President Barry Mills in which he addresses the support staff and then opens up the floor for questions.

The SSAC also surveys Bowdoin support staff and uses that information to help decide what programs to work on putting together. Recently, after hearing that staff were interested in skill building, especially surrounding computer programming and software use, the SSAC worked to install a Lynda.com kiosk in H-L Library. Lynda.com is a website which provides tutorials that improve users’ computer skills. Staff members have access to this kiosk and can use it to browse and view a large variety of these tutorials.

The SSAC also worked to set up a sick bank, where employees can donate up to 100 hours of sick time per year, provided they keep 500 hours in their own bank. Support staff who must miss work for extended time periods due to illness or injury, yet don’t qualify for disability, can use hours from the bank.

The SSAC meets with HR to discuss trends and desires of the staff, but does not discuss individuals. Spoerri also sits on the SSAC.

The job of dealing with day-to-day concerns of employees falls less to the SSAC, which focuses on longer-term improvements, and more on the Workplace Advisors Program (WAP).

There are currently eight workplace advisors on campus and the group includes both faculty and support staff. According to their brochure, the WAP “provides a confidential, neutral and informal process that facilitates fair and equitable resolutions to concerns that arise in the workplace.”

The function of the WAP is primarily to provide a listening ear to the concerns of employees. There is no formal procedure that is associated with contacting a Workplace Advisor, conversations are not on the record, and the only time they are required to disclose information brought to them is if it involves imminent harm or sexual harassment. 

Talking to a Workplace Advisor does not involve a notice being sent to HR. Mostly, Workplace Advisors aid in conflict resolution by giving advice or connecting staff to other resources that could help them. Donna Trout, the coordinator of the psychology department and the coordinator of WAP, says the experience is like talking to a friend.

“You’re never really sure if they’re asking you something because you’re a Workplace Advisor or because you know them,” said Trout.

Trout said that most problems that get brought up with her are surrounding issues with co-workers or supervisors, and often concern inequity—when an employee feels they are being treated differently than someone else.

Workplace Advisors are nominated by their peers, then selected by the current Workplace Advisors. They then receive HR training. The Workplace Advisors also meet with the College’s President to discuss trends that they have encountered, though due to their anonymity policy, no specifics are brought up.

Correction, May 2: An earlier version of this article stated that the disability plan for support staff kicks in after 25 days of missing work due to a disability; it has been corrected to show that the disability plan kicks in after 15 days.

Professors’ salaries increased for the third straight year in 2013-2014. From 2009-2010 to 2010-2011, the College froze salaries in response to a 17 percent loss in the endowment during the recession.

Additionally, the College has reinstated the 4-5-6 policy for salary increases, which was suspended during the freeze. This policy makes the percentage increase in the amount of money for salary increases at each level of professorship equal to the three-year lagging average of percentage salary increases at the colleges ranked fourth, fifth and sixth in Bowdoin’s 18-school peer group (selected by the Board of Trustees).

Despite the recovery of the endowment, the College had to wait until this year to reinstate its 4-5-6 policy because so many of its peer colleges reduced or froze professor salaries during the recession, which rendered the calculations inapplicable. According to Dean of Academic Affairs Cristle Collins Judd, the policy ensures that Bowdoin can offer competitive salaries.

“It’s important to recognize where our aspirations are in terms of the placement of our faculty compensation relative to our peers,” Judd said.Bowdoin is 11th among liberal arts colleges in terms of salaries paid to full professors, according to data from the Chronicle of Higher Education.Full professors at Bowdoin now make, on average, $135,067 per year, up from $131,300 last year, according to notes from the faculty meeting on April 7. 

The average pay raise for full professors was 2.9 percent, according to the Chronicle. 

“We’ve been fortunate because we’ve been able to give reasonable increases but I think for everyone faculty salary increases in the 2 to 3.5 percent range are smaller than the rate of increases of faculty salaries prior to 2008,” said Judd.

Last year, average salaries for associate professors salaries were raised from $94,900 to $96,858, and for assistant professors, from $74,300 to $76,081. Associate professors are tenured, while assistant professors are typically, although not always, on the tenure track. 

Bowdoin is ranked 9th and 16th among liberal arts schools for salaries of associate and assistant professors, respectively, according to data from the Chronicle.

Dining Service has one of the toughest jobs on campus. Producing enough food to feed the campus comes with many challenges, one of which is what to do with all the food waste that inevitably piles up when cooking on such a large scale.

This is where Mike Brooks, a local farmer, comes into the picture. Every day, he drives to Bowdoin in his truck and picks up somewhere between 10 and 15 50-gallon buckets of food scraps which he feeds to his cows and pigs. Brooks estimated that he removes about one ton of food waste each day. 

In taking away food waste for free, Brooks saves the College around $400-$560 per week in waste removal costs and tipping fees. Aside from being advantageous for Bowdoin, Brooks himself reaps the benefit of a significant reduction in his grain bill, which would amount to hundreds of dollars per day without alternate food sources. 

Lester Prue, the unit manager at Moulton, explained how significant that benefit is for the College. 

“The waste removal costs... are astronomical, and whatever we can do to reduce this is helpful,” Prue said. It “helps out the College and helps out the farmer, so it’s a win-win hopefully.”However, Brooks still feels the College could do more composting. He especially feels that Thorne is not giving him as much as they could be. 

“Whoever is in charge [at Thorne] does not try,” said Brooks. “Over here [at Moulton] they try real hard. If they would start recycling to where they should be, I have a bigger truck I’d love to use.”

However, Mark Dickey, unit manager at Thorne, said that with the number of people Thorne feeds, he doesn’t think Brooks would be able to handle the increase.

“I’m feeding a thousand people [at dinner], if Mike is picking up fourteen bags right now and I’m giving him three more a day, I’m not sure he’d be able to use all that food,” Dickey said.

Brooks consistently picks up seven to ten barrels a day from Moulton and around four from Thorne, according to Brooks and the Moulton and Thorne unit managers. 

One explanation for this discrepancy are the different methods used in the two dishrooms, according to sources in the Dining Service. At Moulton, employees carefully sort through the plates that come from students and sort items left on the plate (post-consumer waste) into organic and inorganic waste buckets. The organic waste goes to Brooks. Prue said the amount of waste Moulton is able to collect is a testament to the dedication of their staff. 

“It’s very difficult for our staff, they do their best to separate it, but it’s a hard job. A toothpick could kill a pig,” said Prue.

Christine Ridley, a dining service employee, reiterated the commitment to composting at Moulton. 

“We do the dishroom itself I’m gonna say four [food scrap barrels] a day at least,” said Ridley. “And the salad room, they do not throw away anything. Anything those pigs can eat goes in.”

Thorne uses a different system entirely. In the dishroom there, food waste, along with the occasional napkin, is flushed into a pulping machine, which compresses it, removing 80 percent of the water, before grinding it into small, rice-like pellets, which are then thrown away. 

Brooks says he does not take these pellets because he can’t count on them being clean. 

“I’ve taken it before and pulled chunks of glass out of it,” said Brooks. “That happened a couple times that I took it and I lost a couple pigs...They get the scent of that food, that glass, and they just chomp into it...It shreds their innards and they bleed to death.”

Dickey and Associate Director of Dining Ken Cardone and Dickey both said that the glass likely had not come out of the pulper but rather as a result of a staff member putting inorganic waste in a barrel that they shouldn’t have. With waste going to both the pigs and the dumpster in similar-looking 30 gallon buckets, the mistake can have unfortunate consequences.

“We immediately stopped giving him the pulping material at that time,” said Dickey. “We don’t want to hurt these pigs, we want to feed them.” 

There is no official contract between the College and Brooks, but Brooks claims that in initial discussions in March 2008, the College told him that it was planning on buying two to four pigs per year from him. As of now, Bowdoin has only purchased two. The College has no obligation to buy Brooks’ pigs, but Brooks still feels he is not getting everything he signed up for. 

“If Mike has any questions about that he needs to talk to us about it,” said Cardone. “We’ve been doing this since 2008.”

“Six years and that’s the first I’ve heard about that,” Dickey added.

Brooks also wishes the College would contribute to the fuel costs he incurs driving to and from his farm 12 miles away, pointing to the money he saves the College in waste removal. 

Though the arrangement may not be perfect, Cardone said he feels the agreement is fair and mutually beneficial. 

“It’s a trade-off: we supply the barrels and the back and forth. We wash and sanitize them and put them back in use and he hauls them away every day, which is great because we don’t have to store them,” Cardone said. “It’s been a successful arrangement with Mike, and it’s been a good one; it’s being put to use.”

Yesterday was a big day for Becky Marcos and Wayne Bartlett. The pair opened the Lighthouse Variety & Deli at 51 Harpswell Road, formerly the site of the Brunswick Variety Deli. Within blocks of Harpswell Apartments and the Schwartz Outdoor Leadership Center, the deli is one of the few commercial enterprises bordering campus.

Since purchasing the deli this summer, Marcos and Bartlett have cleaned the place up—Marcos said she swears you could eat off the floors. 

The duo said that they envision the Lighthouse Deli as a fun and convenient place for Bowdoin students. The Deli is merely minutes from campus and Marcos and Bartlett’s home, and is the realization of a 30-year dream.