Gideon Moore
Number of articles: 8First article: October 30, 2015
Latest article: November 8, 2016
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Faculty salaries rise, Bowdoin remains fifth-highest paying NESCAC institution
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Seniors earn global grants, most to teach English abroad on Fulbright fellowships
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New gender inclusive design standards to guide future bathroom, locker room labeling
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ELECTION 2016 Election 2016 survey results
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BSG passes proposal to request legal protection of members
Longreads
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Seniors earn global grants, most to teach English abroad on Fulbright fellowships
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Professors Ghodsee and Boyle receive honorable mentions for their books
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New gender inclusive design standards to guide future bathroom, locker room labeling
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Bowdoin begins reaccreditation process
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Art exhibit celebrates graduating visual arts majors’ studio work
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ELECTION 2016: Election 2016 survey results
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Art exhibit celebrates graduating visual arts majors’ studio work
An exhibit of work created by 17 seniors opens today in the Edwards Center for Art and Dance until today. There will be a reception tonight from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Students worked on their pieces as part of Senior Studio, a course, which is designed to provide seniors with an opportunity to create their own individual body of work.
“All of a sudden, they’ve gone from having set structure and set assignments to really having to be their own driving force behind what they’re doing and why they’re doing it,” said Assistant Professor of Art Jackie Brown, who is leading the studio.
Throughout the semester, students developed their own works with the media of their choice. Students frequently critiqued each other’s work, and faculty were asked to give commentary on several pieces before their completion.
“[Each student], at the beginning of the semester, had a definite interest, and they had kind of honed in on that,” said Henry Austin ’16. “Then through the semester with critical feedback and conversations, they were able to open up and expound on some of those ideas that were very important to them.”
Students used a variety of media in the creation of their works, including projectors, suspended strings and old cars.
“All my work right now is surrounded by these objects that I found in a dump site in the woods nearby,” said Anna Reyes ’16. “[I was interested in] the strange role of me being kind of a rescuer for them but then also taking them out of their final resting place and that weird kind of tension.”
Not all students worked individually. Cody Stack ’16 and Hector Magana ’16 worked together on a series of works investigating experiences and concepts in nostalgia.
“I don’t think the challenge was me and Hector collaborating; it was actually taking the best of the two things that you do and making them work together,” said Stack. “I think we struck a really nice balance between Hector’s linguistic, photographic and pop culture knowledge and skills and how we relate that to the world around him and then some of the things I kind of aesthetically obsess about and the materials I like to play with.”
Many of the artists are excited about being able to display their own culminating work and to see the final projects of their peers.
“It’s been an incredible semester because the variety and breadth of the artwork that’s represented in this show is astounding,” said Austin. “It’s so much more valuable and so much more interesting if the people around you are approaching it and making work that is completely different, [work] you would never dream of making yourself. That’s been one of my favorite parts about this.”
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Faculty salaries rise, Bowdoin remains fifth-highest paying NESCAC institution
According to a report from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), professor salaries at Bowdoin, not adjusted for inflation, rose by 4 percent for full professors, 4.1 percent for associate professors and 5.9 percent for assistant professors. Within the NESCAC on average, salaries rose by 3.38 percent, 4.32 percent and 4.64 percent respectively. In comparison, overall salaries across the country rose by an inflation-adjusted average of 2.7 percent.
The College determines raises for its professors using its “4-5-6” policy. This policy bases raises on the raises given by other colleges in Bowdoin’s peer group—specifically, the salary increases based on the fourth-, fifth- and sixth-highest-paying institutions of the 18 schools. The Board of Trustees determines this comparison group each year.
Paying full professors an average of $138,400 per year, Bowdoin’s ranking in the NESCAC has remains the fifth-highest paying institution in the 11-school conference.
The AAUP attributes part of the national salary increases to a change in how faculty are classified—more and more schools are shifting full-time, tenure-track positions to part-time adjuncts, which are not included in the calculations.
“We are in an enviable position at Bowdoin where that is not a practice that we engage in,” said Dean for Academic Affairs Jen Scanlon. “We do certainly hire, we have some lecturers, we have some adjunct faculty, but for the most part our non-tenure-track faculty are visitors to the College, so they are replacing faculty members who are on sabbatical.”
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BSG passes proposal to request legal protection of members
Update, April 8, 9:09 p.m.:
The BSG vote to add a Good Standing Amendment to their bylaws passed. Students on and wishing to join the BSG must be in good standing with the College.
Original article, published April 8:
The Bowdoin Student Government (BSG) passed a motion at their meeting on Wednesday to request that the College pay any legal fees for BSG members acting in their office. President Danny Mejia-Cruz ’16 will bring the request to the administration for their approval. The proposal aims for a freer discourse within the BSG and is in response to the earlier prospect of legal action three BSG members faced earlier this semester after they authored the articles for impeachment for two other BSG members. Currently no other schools that the council has spoken to have legal protection in their by-laws. However, Mejia-Cruz has been in communication with other schools such as Harvard University and Middlebury College who also are investigating providing their student government members with legal protection. Members of the BSG drew parallels with employment contracts—many firms offer to protect their employees if the employee is sued while acting in their professional capacity.
The BSG also voted by sealed secret ballot via an email link to automatically remove members who fall out of good standing with the College from their governmental duties. Voting closed Thursday at noon, but results were not yet available at press time. Removed members could appeal their removal to the Executive Committee, which is made up of the student body president and the six vice presidents. By a majority vote of the committee, a student could be reinstated to the BSG. Students in poor standing who wish to run for office must also receive the approval of the BSG. While some members of the BSG voiced concerns that tying BSG eligibility to an administrative classification would hamper the government’s independence, others claimed that the appeals process prevents the administration from hampering the BSG, as the Executive Committee can prevent the expulsion of a member from the institution should the administration choose to discipline them.
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Seniors earn global grants, most to teach English abroad on Fulbright fellowships
As graduation approaches, some seniors already have the next year of their lives mapped out. This year’s fellowship winners will be traveling across the globe to pursue various personal interests, from home construction to Slavic languages, and, in most cases, to teach English.Of the 38 Bowdoin students who applied for Fulbright fellowships this year, 20 were named national finalists, and seven have been accepted thus far, all as English Teaching Assistants: seniors Kenny Cortum, Talia Cowen, David Jimenez, Bridget Kranz, Michelle Kruk and Anna Piotti and alumnus Mark Richter ’14. A number of applicants are still waiting to hear back, including all those who applied for study research grants.
In addition, Tess Hamilton ’16 was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship and Caroline Martinez ’16 was awarded a grant from the Davis Projects for Peace organization to teach free leadership trainings to women in Ecuador. Will Danforth ’16 received a Princeton in Asia fellowship to work with the organization in Mongolia. Meg Freiberger ’16 was awarded a National Science Foundation research fellowship.
“The beauty is that there is such an array of national fellowships, so it’s not just one particular profile of a student who would look good for a national fellowships, there’s lots of different profiles,” said Director of Students Fellowships and Research Cindy Stocks.
Several fellowship winners credited the approach of the Office of Student Fellowships and Research in developing their applications.
“I’ve been through this numerous times, so when a student gives me a draft, I have the perspective of having seen years of earlier drafts and seeing who’s won and who hasn’t, so then I can help students think about what to they can tell their particular fellowships,” Stocks said. The Fulbright Program, sponsored by the U.S. State Department, sends newly graduated students and alumni to teach English or conduct research abroad. Fulbright fellows act as representatives of American culture and foster international bonds.
Applicants apply to a country they are interested in and are selected based upon two page-long essays—the Personal Statement and the Statement of Grant Purpose—as well as three recommendation letters.
Cortum will be traveling to Bulgaria as an English Teaching Assistant. He says that while teaching in Bulgaria, he hopes to be able to further his study of Bulgarian language and culture.“I’m a connoisseur of some sorts of Slavic languages; I collect them, if you can collect languages like Pokemon” said Cortum.
He says his experiences learning Polish, Russian and Serbian will help him to understand the mistakes his students make learning English.
Cowen leaves for South Korea in July, where she will complete orientation and start teaching English. Currently, the South Korean education system is shifting its focus from memorization to critical thinking. Cowen describes her own learning style as “at the intersection of both” methods and is excited to witness that transition.
“[Teaching in South Korea is] a total break from anything I’ve done here,” Cowen said. “I think the liberal arts education, the model of being exposed to many different things, prepares you for the shock of going somewhere totally different.”
Jimenez was accepted to the Romanian program. He says his interest in the country began in middle school with a book his uncle wrote about the country. “I remember reading through it, kind of captivating me a bit in eighth or ninth grade,” said Jimenez.
Kranz will be teaching English at a high school in Slovakia. For Kranz, the allure of Slovakia is deeply rooted in its political history. She is looking forward to seeing how Slovakia, which gained its independence in 1993, is handling itself politically and economically after being occupied by the Germans and the Soviets and being part of Czechoslovakia, where the Slovaks were a minority with little opportunity to self-determine.
A visual arts major, Kranz hopes to use her time in Slovakia to start working towards her goal of bringing art experiences to children in rural areas. “Because I’m only helping teach 15 hours a week, I’m hoping that I’ll either be able to start or help with a pre-existing community or after school art program,” Kranz said.
The Watson Fellowship is awarded “to college graduates of exceptional promise to engage in a year of independent learning and travel abroad, in pursuit of an approved project of unique personal significance,” according to its website.
Using the fellowship, Hamilton intends to study how people live “in harmony with the surrounding landscape” all over the world. She intends to visit Iceland, Scotland, Mongolia, Tamarin and Portugal to examine the different ways which people build their homes. For example, Mongolia has supported many nomadic peoples in the past. However, desertification caused by Ulaanbaatar, the country’s major city, has made nomadic life more difficult and Hamilton intends to study how this increasing desertification has influenced local home building.
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New gender inclusive design standards to guide future bathroom, locker room labeling
Last week, the College approved new gender inclusive design standards to guide future constructions and renovations in an attempt to make bathrooms and locker rooms more gender inclusive. These efforts aim to provide a safe environment for community members whose identities are other than cisgender (identifying as the gender assigned at birth).
The standards require that future building projects include lockable, single stall restrooms on the main floor during construction and applicable renovations. These restrooms will not be designated to a single gender but instead will be accessible to students of all genders. These rooms will be labeled as “restroom” rather than “men” or “women.” Signage is able to be further altered on an ad hoc basis.
Also included in the guidelines is an expectation that all facilities with locker rooms or showers provide private changing rooms and showers.
These standards are designed to provide students identifying as transgender (not identifying with gender assigned at birth) or nonbinary (a category that refers to gender identities that are not exclusively masculine or feminine) who might not feel comfortable in men’s or women’s restrooms.
“Personally, they’re important because being able to access non-gendered spaces is very important to making me feel comfortable, to making me feel like I’m not compromising my identity by entering a gendered bathroom,” said Paul Cheng ’17. “Every time I do that, there’s this sense that I’m projecting this idea that I’m not really agender. I’m still basically a man or something. It feels like the message that I’m sending.”
In the past, the College has had trouble providing for non-cisgendered students due to the small scale of the student body.
“It’s hard, from scale, because we’re a smaller school,” said Kate Stern, director of the Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity. “A lot of the bigger universities I’ve seen, if you picture where there’s the men’s and women’s locker rooms, there might be another one that’s called the ‘family dressing room,’ or ‘family room,’ that someone could take their children in with them or someone could use as gender inclusive.
“But again, it’s the scale. [When] we think about a mammoth university with 50,000 people and their giant sports complex, it looks like a different thing,” Stern added.
As part of forming the standards, Stern traveled to several other colleges and universities to examine their versions of these policies.
After Stern researched other schools’ regulations, Director of Capital Projects Don Borkowski drafted the standards which circulated through the administration before receiving approval from President Clayton Rose and Dean of Student Affairs Tim Foster.
“We said ‘Yeah, it’s the right thing to do,’ and so this is the Bowdoin version of it,” said Katy Longley, senior vice president for finance and administration and treasurer.
These standards are part of a larger movement within the administration towards a more gender-inclusive campus. Facilities has already implemented 40 gender-neutral bathrooms across campus. Other recent projects include the change this year in first year bricks, where the previously gender-segregated showers are now unisex.
“We’ve been moving in this direction anyway, but this is just to put it in writing that this will be the standard practice, as opposed to what we’ve been doing, to make it more formalized,” said Stern.
John Branch and Nicholas Mitch contributed to this report.
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Bowdoin begins reaccreditation process
Last week Bowdoin held its preliminary meeting for its upcoming reaccreditation, a process the College goes through every 10 years in which the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC) recertifies the College as an educational institution.
Bowdoin was due for reaccreditation last year but received a deferral due to the induction of President Clayton Rose. Previous reaccreditations have led to the adoption of the College House system in conjunction with the abolition of fraternities as well as the implementation of distribution requirements within the College’s curriculum.
The reaccreditation process is centered on a self-study by the College, which gives it the chance to reevaluate itself in regard to nine standards published by NEASC. This self-reflection makes up the vast majority of the process and is collected at the end in a 100-page report, which is then released to the Bowdoin community for feedback and sent to NEASC. Then, a committee from the accrediting organization comes and conducts an inspection.
The committee conducting the self-study within Bowdoin will be co-chaired by Vice President for Institutional Research, Analytics and Consulting Tina Finneran and Dean for Academic Affairs Jen Scanlon. While the exact structure of the committee is still uncertain, according to Scanlon, the committee will be consulting not only with faculty but also staff and students in order to address their concerns about the future of the College.
Once the internal examination is complete, the report is sent for inspection to a NEASC committee.
“In the end, the final self-study will be given to that team before they visit, and then they come on site, and it’s sort of a ground truthing—‘Here’s what they said. Let’s meet with folks and understand Bowdoin better and confirm that what they stated in this document is accurate,’” said Finneran.
This NEASC committee is typically chaired by a member of a peer institution. Other members of the committee include faculty from other schools to examine the academics and chief financial officers to inspect the finances of the College.
“In many ways, it’s a peer review with the oversight of the accrediting agency,” Finneran said. Bowdoin will be inspected by the NEASC committee from November 5 to 8 in 2017.
After the completion of the reaccreditation process, Bowdoin maintains a relationship with NEASC, reporting its progress on achieving the goals outlined in the self-study. This relationship manifests in a five-year update that the College publishes between reaccreditations to update NEASC on its progress.
The standards used by NEASC in its accreditation are divided into nine categories, such as Organization and Governance, Academic Program and Integrity, Transparency and Public Disclosure. A new set of standards was approved earlier this year.
“One of the things that you’ll see in the standards is much more of a focus on outcomes and this idea of evidence—how do you know that a student has learned what a Biology major should learn?” said Finneran.
Finneran highlighted a standard adopted in this year’s edition which ensures colleges are transparent regarding their use of student records. She believes this is especially key as colleges transition into digital recordkeeping over hard copy files.
James Little contributed to this report.
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Professors Ghodsee and Boyle receive honorable mentions for their books
Professors Kristen Ghodsee and Margaret Boyle each received an honorable mention for their respective research books last week.
The Association for Women in Slavic Studies recognized Ghodsee’s book “The Left Side of History: World War II and the Unfilled Promise of Communism,” as an honorable mention for the Heldt Prize for Best Book in Slavic and East European Women’s Studies. Ghodsee’s book examines communist sympathisers during World War II.
Boyle’s book, “Unruly Women: Performance, Penitence, and Punishment in Early Modern Spain,” received an honorable mention from The Society for the Study of Early Modern Women’s Best Book on Women and Gender for 2014. The book follows the lives of incarcerated women in Early Modern Spain.
Both professors based their books on prior research. Ghodsee, a professor of gender and women’s studies, researches communism in the Eastern European Bloc. Boyle, an assistant professor of romance languages and literatures, has been interested in Early Modern Spain since her undergraduate work at Reed College.
Boyle recommends her book to undergraduates because of the primary source materials within it.
“You can look past the history that I’ve put together and look at what I think is very exciting, which is getting access to first person accounts of the creation of these jails,” she said.
Both professors also teach courses at Bowdoin expanding on the material discussed in the books.
For students intrigued by “Left Side,” Ghodsee teaches two classes which relate to her book: “Radical Families, Radical Politics” and “Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Eastern Europe.”
“These courses focus on the operations of power, the intersections of race, gender and class and the popular mythologies about contemporary capitalism and its political alternatives,” Ghodsee said.
Boyle regularly teaches classes studying early modern literature, such as “Don Quixote,” as well as Spanish language classes. In the past, she has led seminars in the Spanish department, where she continued her emphasis on women in the early modern era.
“If you have professors that you like or admire, take the time to read their books,” Ghodsee said. “In addition to teaching, we are also scholars producing knowledge in our disciplines, and our excitement for our research infuses our enthusiasm in the classroom.”
Ghodsee began writing “The Left Side of History” after a man set himself on fire a block away from her while visiting Eastern Europe in March of 2013.
“I wrote ‘The Left Side of History’ by mistake” said Ghodsee in an email to the Orient. “The smell of burning human flesh spurred me to put fingers to the keyboard.”
“Unruly Women” examines the treatment of incarcerated women in Spain during the early modern era.
“I started out the project in the archives wanting to learn what it meant for women to be friends...and then one of the things I ended up learning about, or running into, were all these documents about the first jails and Magdalene houses created for women,” Boyle said in a phone interview with the Orient.
Boyle has been guided by colleagues and editors since she began dissertation on Early Modern Spain and received support for her book.
“Getting through the editing and revisions process and being optimistic about it all coming together...it’s exciting to finally see it out,” she said.
Ghodsee recommends her book to any Bowdoin student tired of apathy and hipster irony. In it, she follows the political idealism of a Bulgarian peasant girl and an Oxford student fighting to build a better world. She contrasts the idealism present in her book with modern literature.
“These young people believed they could build a better world, and fought, and sometimes died, for those ideals,” Ghodsee said. “Right now, popular young adult literature posits a bleak dystopian future, but I think we need young people to start imagining utopias. My book is maybe the academic equivalent of Disney’s Tomorrowland.”
Correction (November 1, 2015 at 10:20 a.m.): The article previously miswrote the name of the Heldt Prize for Best Book in Slavic and East European Women's Studies. It is the Heldt Prize for Best Book in Slavic and East European Women's Studies, not Heldt Prize for Best Book in Slavic and Eastern Studies. Eastern Bloc was also misspelled. It is Eastern Bloc not Eastern Block.