BatesNews Monthly Update: November 2011
For Bates alumni, parents and friends, here is a look some of the major Bates events and achievements of the past month, important upcoming events and a sampling of Bates people in the news.
In this issue:
1. The new Bates website
2. College costs aren’t the real issue, higher-ed experts tell Bates symposium
3. Trade screen time for inner view, Scott Belsky urges
4. A look back at Open to the World
5. Differences do transform, students of faith agree
6. Life imitates art for Kirk Read’s French students in Nantes
7. Audio slide show: Jennifer Flanagan ’12 talks about her Bus Stop role
8. Fereshetian, men’s cross country cap season with nationals
9. Bates in the News
1. The new Bates website
With its debut on Nov. 1, the new Bates website joins other revamped Bates communications in delivering a unified Bates message to all our audiences, especially those getting to know Bates for the very first time — prospective students and their families — and our frequent visitors among the Bates alumni community. Please share comments, feedback and ideas. “We’re interested in meeting users, learning their needs and finding ways to meet those needs online,” says Bates webteam member Nicholas O’Brien. Email the team at webteam@bates.edu.
2. College costs aren’t the real issue, higher-ed experts tell Bates symposium
While the cost of college is certainly rising, it’s neither inflated nor out of proportion with the considerable benefits of a higher education, according to higher education experts brought together by Bates for the college’s Leadership Symposium on Cost, Value and Financial Aid on Oct. 29.
3. Trade screen time for inner view, Scott Belsky urges
Losing your iPhone is a tragedy, or so said 41 percent of Stanford University students in a 2010 survey. That statistic came out during a Nov. 8 address by Scott Belsky, an expert on technology and creative work who helped Bates kick off a campus-wide experiment in going unplugged, Present Tense: Being Here and Now in a Nonstop World.
4. A look back at Open to the World
For both aerospace industry leader Paul Marks ’83 and former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, the transformational power of education was embodied by teachers who changed their lives. The two shared their inspirational stories during the Oct. 27 celebration of another transformation: Bates’ renovation of Hedge and Roger Williams halls into innovative academic centers.
5. Differences do transform, students of faith agree
Rose Levy-Rubinett ’12 grew up in a household where family history and Judaism were fused into a culture shared and unquestioned, more or less, by everyone. But at Bates, “I’ve had to define for myself what it means being Jewish,” she said. The college’s stated mission to “engage the transformative power of our differences” gives students the means to forge entirely new perspectives on their beliefs, writes Doug Hubley in his story about a multifaith conversation at Bates, one of many events leading up to the dedication of Hedge and Roger Williams halls.
6. Life imitates art for Kirk Read’s French students in Nantes
Professor of French Kirk Read, co-leading this fall’s Bates Semester in Nantes program with colleague Joe Hall (history), shares three of his students’ literary pastiches, or imitations, of the melodramatic heroine Zilia from Letters of a Peruvian Woman by Francoise de Graffigny. The character Zilia has been spirited from Peru to France, where “she encounters a host of troubling, bedazzling and generally perplexing customs and behaviors,” Read explains. Writing the pastiches gave the Bates students “some space in which to explore their own feelings of distress, wonderment and frustration.”
7. Audio slide show: Jennifer Flanagan ’12 talks about her Bus Stop role
Theater major Jennifer Flanagan ’12 of Sherborn, Mass., discusses what it was like to head back to the 1950s for her role as Grace Hoylard in the Bates theater production of William Inge’s Bus Stop, directed by Martin Andrucki, Dana Professor of Theater. Flanagan’s performance was a component of senior thesis in acting.
8. Fereshetian, men’s cross country cap season with honors and nationals
The Bates men’s cross country team, led by NESCAC Coach of the Year Al Fereshetian, received an at-large invite to the NCAA Division III Cross Country Championship, hosted Nov. 19 by the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh at Lake Breeze Golf Course in Winneconne. The Bobcats have been ranked in the top 10 nationally this fall. Coaching honors, Fereshetian says, come from “the team doing so well.”
9. Bates in the News
New England Cable News interviews Cubist head Michael Bonney ’80, who says that curiosity helped his rise from drug store manager to pharmaceutical company CEO. Harvard Crimson staff writer Justin Worland reports on the Bates Chapel’s naming in memory of Peter Gomes ’65, the late Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard. Sun Journal columnist Kalle Oakes writes about the rising fortunes of Bates football in 2011.
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