A selection of recent mentions of Bates and Bates people in the news.
Tyler Austin Harper, environmental studies faculty
Stop accusing Tim Scott of racial heresy for being a Republican — Washington Post
In an op-ed for The Washington Post, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Tyler Austin Harper addressed the perception that Republican U.S. Sen. Tim Scott is a “race traitor” for his conservative politics.
White politicians, Harper wrote, “are permitted to adopt a wide swath of political opinions without accusations of insanity, insincerity or self-hatred.” However, the “window on acceptable Black political discourse is extremely narrow.”
“Politicians and political figures who don’t fit neatly within tightly calibrated models of Black political thought — which is to say, somewhere between the normie liberal center and the progressive fringe — are objects of exoticization that would have made a 19th-century anthropologist blush.”
A few weeks earlier, Harper, whose writing on culture, politics, and the environment has appeared in a number of outlets, including Slate, Salon, and the BBC, wrote an opinion essay for The Boston Globe about his experience as a Black professor who is an expert on 19th- and 20th-century British literature, “the infamous ‘dead white men’ of European art and letters,” and how he has had to defend his scholarly interest and “fight the assertion that I should spend my time researching authors who share my skin color.” He said he finds such criticism troubling: “an assault on the very idea of literature and art.”
- Read the story: “Stop accusing Tim Scott of racial heresy for being a Republican,” The Washington Post, June 26, 2023
Bates Dance Festival
10 dance events to enjoy this summer — WBUR
“The hills and the beaches will be alive with sights and sounds of dancers as their troupes head for the countryside in search of fresh air, sand, and new stages,” noted Iris Fanger in a preview of 10 dance events to enjoy this summer for WBUR, a list that includes the Bates Dance Festival. Fanger specifically highlighted the festival’s intriguing thematic presentations “related to race and identity.”
- Read more: “10 dance events to enjoy this summer,” WBUR, June 15, 2023
Laura Poppick ’10
A quaint Maine island with a billion year-old secret — Down East magazine
Science and environmental journalist Laura Poppick ’10, a regular contributor to Down East magazine, tapped into her Bates geology major for a first-person story about what researchers say are Maine’s (and quite possibly New England’s) very oldest rocks, found on 700 Acre Island in Penobscot Bay.
The ancient rocks on 700 Acre Island, she wrote, “formed more than a billion years ago, when life consisted mostly of microbial goo. The rest of Maine’s bedrock formed much more recently, with most of it dating less than 500 million years old — still plenty ancient, but from an era when the planet was more recognizable as the place we inhabit today.”
“It’s been more than a decade since I was a geology undergrad at Bates College,” wrote Poppick. Since then, she added, “I’ve maintained an interest in rocks and the stories stuck within them. I find they offer a salve to the frenetic nature of the present. They can tell us, with a plain sort of wisdom, where we came from eons ago and where we might be going eons from now.”
- Read the story: “A quaint Maine island with a billion year-old secret,” Down East magazine, June 2023
Hallie Herz ’11
A new queer-focused outdoor gear library in Portland encourages the LGBTQ+ community to get outdoors — Maine Public
Maine Public’s Carol Bousquet talked to Hallie Herz ’11 and their partner, Eva Fury, about their startup nonprofit, Kindling Collective in Portland, the nation’s first queer-focused outdoor gear library.
The mission of Kindling Collective is to help folks feel comfortable about camping, hiking, and other outdoor pursuits, to provide “a pathway into those beautiful embodied joyful experiences outside,” said Fury, “but in a way that people feel they can access without as much fear.”
The nonprofit’s membership model is also focused on economic justice, said Herz. “So based on resources and money, the more you have, the more you pay. The less you have, the less you pay.”
- Read the story: “A new queer focused outdoor gear library in Portland encourages the LGBTQ+ community to get outdoors,” Maine Public, June 16, 2023
Ellie Vance ’21
Ellie Vance reaps a harvest as FoodCorps teacher at Lewiston schools — Lewiston Sun Journal
Ellie Vance ’21 spoke with the Lewiston Sun Journal’s Andrew Rice about her experience teaching students at a local elementary school about gardening, sustainability, and cooking.
“By giving students access to gardening and cooking, we can broaden their horizons and expand their curiosity around food,” said Vance. “When they have that curiosity, they have more agency over their food and knowing what foods they like to eat and what they don’t like.”
The program at Montello Elementary School is sponsored by St. Mary’s Nutrition Center in Lewiston and FoodCorps, a national nonprofit focused on connecting students to healthy food in schools.
Vance next is heading to Tufts University for graduate studies in agriculture, food, and environmental studies.
- Read the story: “Kudos: Ellie Vance reaps a harvest as FoodCorps teacher at Lewiston schools,” Lewiston Sun Journal, June 2, 2023
Jim Nutting ’76
Lisbon Falls art studio creates stained glass masterpieces
Maine Art Glass in Lisbon Falls, where Jim Nutting ’76 operates his studio and gallery — and his own “bug museum” — was featured in Maine Home+Design and WGME, and he talked about how his biology major at Bates College led him to creating bug-themed stained glass pieces.
“My entire life, I’ve collected anything that has to do with natural history,” he said. “I’ve been collecting butterflies longer than I’ve been working with glass.” (Which he’s been doing for 43 years.) In addition to teaching classes and making his own art, Nutting performs stained glass restoration and repair. “I love crafting. I love making things. I love collecting things and I enjoy sharing it and teaching it,” Nutting said.
Read more:
- “All things bright & beautiful,” Maine Home+Design, June, 2023
- “Lisbon Falls art studio creates stained glass masterpieces,” WGME, May 11, 2023
Stephen Hoad ’72
Seeing their needs, teachers use technology to help visually impaired students thrive in the classroom — Lewiston Sun Journal
For a story about educational resources for visually impaired students in Maine, the Lewiston Sun Journal’s Vanessa Paolella ’21 interviewed Stephen Hoad ’72, who talked about his experience growing up blind decades ago in New Jersey. As a child, Hoad had extensive access to school books in braille. But at Bates, his textbooks were only available on tape. Today, people with visual impairments use speech screen readers to read text on their computer screens.
“There has to be a mindset within each person that teaches a blind student that that blind student is normal,” Hoad said. “That’s very hard.”
He added that visually impaired children need to learn life skills alongside an academic education. “I know some older blind folks who have really suffered because they weren’t taught some of the skills, not just computer skills, but some of the general skills that are very necessary to operate as an independent blind person.”
- Read the story: “Seeing their needs, teachers use technology to help visually impaired students thrive in the classroom,” Lewiston Sun Journal, June 10, 2023
Jean Thompson ’82
Meet Jean Thompson, the woman making a social impact through chocolate — Forbes
Speaking with Forbes, Jean Thompson ’82, owner and CEO of Seattle Chocolates, shared advice on aligning a career with a life purpose.
First, she offered, “try lots of jobs and expose yourself to different industries when you’re young.” From that, “you will quickly discover what you enjoy doing the most — your genius. Then commit yourself to spending most of your time in that genius zone.”
Second, don’t put yourself on a timetable. “Your life purpose will come when it comes; there’s no deadline or right time to learn this. I was in my late 40s when I realized that the chocolate company was so much more than a job for me. Go easy on yourself and the clock; the purpose will reveal itself along the way.”
Thompson is aligning her mission as a CEO with sustainability and empowering girls and women, because “as business owners, we have the power and responsibility to leave our industries and the world in a better place,” she said. “When it becomes clear how you can best serve, it becomes a purpose.”
- Read the story: “Meet Jean Thompson, the woman making a social impact through chocolate,” Forbes, June 12, 2023
Adriana Pastor ’25
This island and its birds are like a Hitchcock movie: it’s madness, but also part miracle — The Boston Globe
An article in The Boston Globe highlighting tern restoration efforts in Massachusetts quoted Adriana Pastor ’25, a volunteer with MassWildlife, the state agency leading a project to support the endangered roseate terns that nest on three Buzzards Bay islands.
Pastor volunteers on Bird Island, one of the three islands. It’s not an easy place to work, wrote reporter Billy Baker, noting that there is no “real way to prepare someone for the sensory overload that is Bird Island… The sound grows from a dull roar to a shattering shriek, and with it the realization from the crew — five young student volunteers — that they are going to spend the next five hours trapped inside a Hitchcock movie.”
“The first day here, I thought I was going to die,” said Pastor. “I was honestly wondering if I would ever see my family again. I wanted to leave. But now, I kind of love it.”
- Read the story: “This island and its birds are like a Hitchcock movie — it’s madness, but also part miracle,” The Boston Globe, June 12, 2023
Sarah Sherman-Stokes ’05, Rachel Silver ’05
Titan rescue efforts raise questions about whether migrants’ lives are also worth saving — The Boston Globe
In an opinion piece for The Boston Globe, Bates classmates Sarah Sherman-Stokes ’05 and Rachel Silver ’05 suggested that the rescue operation mounted for the Titan submersible “raises questions about a differential valuation of human life.”
The authors noted that “the political will and resources devoted to trying to save the wealthiest among us far outweigh those directed at trying to rescue the thousands of migrants and asylum seekers who have also been lost at sea in their search for safety.”
Sherman-Stokes is a clinical associate professor of law and associate director of the Immigrants’ Rights and Human Trafficking Clinic at Boston University School of Law. Silver is an assistant professor at York University’s Faculty of Education and Centre for Refugee Studies in Toronto.
- Read the story: “Titan rescue efforts raise questions about whether migrants’ lives are also worth saving,” The Boston Globe, June 23, 2023
Elizabeth Castellano ’12
Save What’s Left is one of the summer’s nationally acclaimed reads
Praised for its wit and satirical humor, the debut novel by Elizabeth Castellano ’12, Save What’s Left, is popping up on a number of summer reading lists. Good Morning America picked it as their Book Club for July, Time included it among 25 books that “you need to read this summer,” and Oprah Daily named it among 25 of the “best books to read on your summer vacation,” calling it a “wickedly funny debut.”
Castellano, who majored in theater at Bates, draws on her small-town childhood on Long Island to follow her protagonist, Kathleen Deane, who tries to live an idyllic seaside life by buying a shack in Long Island. But instead, she finds herself embroiled in the trials and tribulations that come with living in a beach house — and the neighbors next to her,” wrote Good Morning America’s Haley Yamada. “Irreverent and unexpectedly tender, this story takes neighborhood feuding to new heights and finds beauty and reinvention in unlikely places,” noted Oprah Daily.
- Read more: “‘Save What’s Left’ by Elizabeth Castellano is our ‘GMA’ Book Club pick for July,” Good Morning America, June 27, 2023
