Even a cursory glance around campus reveals the ways in which the College has changed since its founding. Buildings, in a range of architectural styles across various time periods, reflect not only the College’s evolution, but also the changes in its leadership.
Pete Seeger stood on the stage of Pickard Theater in front of a single microphone. He picked the strings of his signature long-neck banjo and whistled a gentle harmony, his foot tapping out the beat. After a minute, he stopped playing and began to explain the history of the long-neck banjo and the folk music he played on it.
When you “take financial resources and human beings and juxtapose them such that they produce an added value in human beings,” what do you get? A college, according to former Bowdoin President Robert H. Edwards.
Hanging on Associate Professor of History Sarah McMahon’s wall, tucked between letters from family members and images of the Maine landscape, hangs a quote from former President of the College Robert Edwards: “These colleges, this one in particular, grew until 1970.
College presidents are a special kind of celebrity. They’re probably not the kind you’d stop to take a picture with, but whether or not we realize it, many of Bowdoin’s presidents’ names are ubiquitous on campus.
Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination was a fresh wound in American public memory, and white institutions across the country were beginning to confront major gaps in their course offerings and their woefully homogenous student bodies.
Bowdoin has no shortage of notable alumni to boast about. Yet unless you’re a physicist or engineer, you might not have heard of Edwin Hall, Bowdoin Class of 1875.
Hall was born in Gorham, Maine on November 7, 1855, and grew up in the area, ultimately attending the College and continuing on to make enormous strides in his respective field of physics that altered the course of fields such as engineering and technology entirely.