President Clayton Spencer’s final public remarks as the college’s eighth president were at the Annual Gathering of the Alumni Association held during Reunion on June 10, 2023.

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George Colby Chase was the second president of Bates, serving for 25 years, from 1894 to 1919. He graduated from the college in 1869 and before becoming president, he was a professor of English here for 22 years.

According to college lore, Chase was known as “the great builder.” He oversaw the construction of 11 new buildings, including Coram Library, Rand Hall, the Central Heating Plant, which, by the way, I’m pretty sure is the same heating plant we’re dealing with today. He also oversaw the building of the Chapel, Libbey Forum, Carnegie Science Hall, and Chase Hall. I should add that President Chase tripled the number of students and faculty, and he managed to quadruple the college’s endowment from $259,000 to $1,135,000.

This is an impressive legacy by any standard. But I love George Colby Chase not because of the buildings he built or the “things” he accomplished, but rather because of his vision of what a Bates education should be about. In his inaugural address, Chase wrote that the aim of the college should be to produce graduates whose “education shall have prepared them to live in every chamber of their being, to be at home in the world as the world presents itself today, and to master…the opportunities that the many-sided life of our age may offer.”

This vision of the liberal arts as a deeply humanistic, yet powerfully adaptive and pragmatic, model of education is one of the things that inspired me when I dug in to learn about Bates as I prepared to come here as president in 2012.

The commitment to educate the whole person, head and heart, and in “every chamber of their being,” and to prepare our students to engage the world as it “presents itself today” spoke to me. This is noble and earnest work, and we all have benefited from the distinctive way we do this work at Bates.

Working with students to figure out who they are, what they want to focus on, and how they wish to make a difference in the world, is certainly rewarding work, but it is also hard work. Especially when the “many-sided life of our age” gets up a head of steam and delivers a global pandemic that upends the world as we know it for the better part of three years. Or stokes a politics of fear and division that is magnified so destructively on college campuses.

Precisely the generation we are meant to be educating is left to wonder what those of us who are supposedly in charge are doing to our planet, why we seem ready to tolerate the injustice and violence tearing at the fabric of our society, and how we have been so careless with resources and structures of opportunity that many of our students aren’t sure that they can figure out a path to afford the basic elements of a good and stable life.

But here’s the good news. Our students are still curious. They are idealistic. They care about the world, they are developing their agency, and they want to gain the knowledge and tools to solve the world’s hardest problems. They are generous and kind and open. And they are very funny.

I still remember a trustee event where the ManOps –- the all-male a cappella group, who were particularly good that year — were asked to provide the entertainment at a pre-dinner reception. When they got to their third song, they made an elaborate gesture of dedicating it to me and then proceeded to sing “It’s Raining Men,” with, I must say, very witty choreography. I was touched, of course, that the students were concerned about the tragic social life of the single lady president living one block behind “party central” on Frye Street.

It is pretty cool to have the opportunity to end this phase of my life as I began it — living on a liberal arts campus among a bunch of 18- to 22-year-olds at such an intense and dynamic time in their own development. The first time, I was a child living in the Davidson president’s house in the ’60s, with my brother’s rock band, complete with scraggly hair and ratty jeans, practicing in the garage behind the dorms. I was taking it all in.

The second time I was a student myself, at Williams, loving the intensity of the academic experience and taking the most arcane and theoretical courses I could find. Much more important, as it turns out, I was also making wonderful friends who Zoom together once a month to this day, 40-plus years later.

This time I have been at Bates, rattling around a bit in the giant president’s house, once again situated among brilliant, intense, and funny students — and the beer pong table permanently set up in the yard of the student house steps from my back door.

My role has been different this time, and it has been rewarding even when it has been hard. But I love intensity, and some of the gnarlier problems that the “many-sided life of our age” have batted up in these past few years have called forth a level of solidarity and trust among colleagues across campus that has made this period for me, and for many others I think, a deeply rewarding experience at the level of shared purpose and human connection.

When I was growing up, I thought that the world was cleanly divided into “kids” and “grownups.” I have a feeling that many of us might have seen the world this way. Anyway, you were a kid when you still lived in your house with your parents, the archetypal grownups; then you went to college and stuff happened during your four years there; and then you emerged, voila, fully adult and ready for the rest of your life. You can imagine my surprise when I was working at Harvard, years ago now, and I met a professor who couldn’t wait to tell me about her course on adult development. “Adult development,” I said, is that actually a field?

I am fond of quoting e.e. cummings’ line that “It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” What I hadn’t realized, of course, before my bifurcated world of human development came crashing down, is that “growing up to become who you really are” is a lifelong project. And where better to carry out this project than a setting where preparing human beings for this journey is exactly the work at hand.

I have heard college presidencies described as soul-sucking experiences, and I am sure some of them are. But my time at Bates has been a gift beyond price.

I recently heard an interview on NPR with Jason Segel, one of the creators and stars of the show Shrinking, which has now finished its first season. It’s about three psychiatrists in practice together whose dilemmas in their personal lives far outweigh the issues unfolding on the couches in their offices. When Segel was asked in the interview why he thought the show had gained such a following, he said something along the following lines: “We’re not afraid of earnestness and we laugh our way through the really hard parts.”

This strikes me as a great description of Bates, and it makes me proud and grateful to be associated with this fabulous college that you guys are lucky enough to claim as your own. If I’ve learned one thing over the past eleven years, it is this: “It’s always a great day to be a Bobcat.”