Sitting in the sun in front of Coram Library with their Bates professors, the 491 members of the Class of 2028 who gathered for Convocation on Tuesday heard advice, both timeless and timely, about navigating their new college.
In his welcome, President Garry W. Jenkins invited the new students to take their place as the newest stewards of Bates’ culture of being open to ideas and beliefs that might differ from one’s own. “It is the work we do together for the broadening and bettering of ourselves, our community, and our world,” he said.
Time-tested advice also came from two student speakers, Sivani Arvapalli ’26 of South Windsor, Conn., and Ethan Chan ’25 of Westborough, Mass., co-presidents of Bates Student Government, who invited the incoming students to be unhesitant in seeking help from those around them.
“When you find yourself facing a new obstacle, considering a new perspective, or exploring a new path, reach out to those here to support you: Professors, advisors, staff, and peers are all here for you,” said Chan.
Along with the timeless, there was also timely advice and guidance reflecting current events, especially the U.S. presidential election just 62 days away.
“You begin your college careers in, shall we say, interesting times,” said Jenkins. “We have a hotly contested emotional presidential election coming our way. As a society, our commitment to openness and civil discourse will be tested as we struggle to meet across lines of discord and difference.
“It’s going to be a challenging time in the U.S., but I believe in this community. I believe in Bates and that means I believe in each of you and in your commitment to openness, to engagement, to active listening, and to respect for those around you. This is the Bates I know and love. This is the community into which I’m so proud to welcome you.”
In these challenging times, Jenkins said, it is crucial to “fight the urge to say or to think, ‘How could anyone think X or support Y or believe Z?’ I have. I’m not proud of it.”
In resisting the urge to automatically nay-say what others believe, “we need to learn both how to listen and how to be heard, how to make an argument and how to really understand the arguments and feelings of others,” Jenkins said. “We need to learn how to relate and connect across differences — how to thoughtfully consider the ways our approaches and actions may be affecting others and how we use that information to pivot or reframe if necessary.
“We need to commit to empathy when it comes to our treatment of others, both in person and online, and learn from our missteps. We need to learn how to see and embrace the complexity rather than simply assert the certainty.”
The welcomes and offerings to the Class of 2028 during Opening Convocation — advice to seek connections, to be open to others, to try new things — reflect in part the deep history of Bates’ annual back-to-college ceremony.
A century ago, the academic ceremony to welcome incoming students was known as “First Chapel,” as a bookend to “Last Chapel” exercises for the senior class held each spring prior to graduation. Now known as Opening Convocation, the fall event remains thematically tethered to Commencement, also held on the lawn in front of Coram Library.
“So it’s here at the heart of this beautiful campus where generations of Bates have come to celebrate both the start and the summation of their studies,” said Jenkins. Gathering together in a meaningful place helps us understand who we are, Jenkins added — the feeling of being “rooted in a powerful sense of place and being part of local, regional, and global ecosystems.”
The timeless power of place was also invoked by the event’s guest speaker, award-winning author Sonja Pieck, the Clark A. Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies. Reflecting a Bates tradition, Pieck was chosen by the graduating Class of 2024 to offer this year’s address to the incoming Class of 2028.
Pieck urged the new students to roam freely around their new home. “Open yourself to notice and appreciate what is here now,” she said. “There are so many quiet, lovely corners waiting to be discovered, like Lake Andrews and its inhabitants, memorials and markers,” she said.
“Find people from the groundskeepers to the archivists at Muskie Archives from your history and anthropology professors to those in ecology and earth systems to help you explore and understand this landscape more deeply.”
The search for beauty and joy “can radiate out into the community, too,” she added. In Lewiston, “appreciate the signs of care and solidarity, the graffiti art and the murals, the children playing in Kennedy Park, the laughter of friends meeting up at the Lewiston Farmers Market, the neighborhood flower boxes, or the Lisbon Street storefronts that someone lovingly tends.”
Pieck’s remarks were titled “Mind the Gap,” which refers to the recorded audio warning heard at train or subway stations in the U.K. alerting passengers to heed the space between the train and the platform.
In terms of a helpful metaphor for life at Bates, “minding the gap” means to mind and tend to those “feelings, memories, and meanings” that tend to get pushed into the gap as we lead busy lives. New college students, especially, are susceptible to shoving important emotions into the gap as they forge ahead in their new community. Grief, she said, is one of those emotions.
In her 2023 book, Mnemonic Ecologies, Pieck explored the conservation of the once-militarized Iron Curtain borderland between the former East and West Germany. Violence and death, and thus grief, were part of the border’s history and legacy. During her research, Pieck saw how conservation on wounded land must engage with grief and memory.
“I know grief is an unusual topic for Convocation, but my field deals with loss and grief all the time,” she told the students. “As individuals, as a society, and as a planet are awash in loss. So how do we honor grief when it comes, tend to it and grow from it?”
Here, Pieck recalled the mass shootings in Lewiston 11 months ago, and conversations that she had with her students in the course “The Politics of Wildlife Conservation,” which included studying species extinction.
Throughout the semester, “grief had been our constant companion,” she recalled. During a class session after Oct. 25, she asked her students to describe the difference between the two powerful human emotions of grief and despair.
Etymologically speaking, “grief” is related to the Latin gravis, meaning “weighty,” while the word “despair” comes from the Latin verb desperare, “to be without hope.”
But the class discussion that day “didn’t actually dwell on etymology,” she said. Instead, they talked about the dominant emotion — grief — that was everywhere in Lewiston after the killings. “Grief was everywhere. Despair, however, was not. A trip through Lewiston neighborhoods showed the living, changing facets of grief — fear, sadness, confusion, anger — and also love, connection, community care, courage.”
Those qualities triumphed in the days, weeks, and months after the killings. “People throughout Maine declared themselves ‘Lewiston Strong.’ The governor declared, ‘We will all help you carry this grief.’”
“In contrast to despair, grief is alive,” said Pieck. “It breathes, it ebbs and flows and transforms within us, and it changes over time. Grief is born from the loss of something we love. Many have said that grief is a hallmark of care and the price we pay for the joy of loving. So grief can call forth some of the most noble and powerful human emotions.”
This is the “gift of grief,” she told the new students, offering three ways that grief can offer timeless lessons in how to be better and more effective humans.
First, grief teaches us to slow down, where “we become sensitive to even the tiniest magnificence: the breath of our own bodies, the rustling of the leaves above our heads today, or the indescribable magic of a new friendship.”
Second, grief teaches resilience. “Coping with loss makes us develop the capacity for dealing with change, with setbacks, with frustration — the uncertainty inherent to living,” she said, adding that “so many of us are eager to support and help you. As you build resilience in the face of challenges, you’re not on your own.”
And third, grief teaches the power of community, “opening us up to our common humanity and bringing us together,” she said. “In fact, shared grief is the inner core of most social movements, including #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, where people harness shared grief to make change. Their profound love for their families, their communities, for land, for place, fuels a vision of what can be imagined.”
Convocation concluded with the traditional tree-planting service, including poetry, music, a watering ritual, that is held in memory of Bates faculty and staff who have died in the past year. The newly planted tree this year was a hop hornbeam, along the path between the Class of 1929 Gate and Hathorn Hall.
Here, too, the emotion of grief was invoked as a path toward healing. “This complexity of emotions within grief is a beautiful thing, a truly human thing, a strength,” said the Rev. Brittany Longsdorf, the college’s multifaith chaplain.
“I invite you in this shared moment of remembrance to feel those layers, those tangles of emotions. This is a moment of spaciousness for those complexities, those tangles to settle in. We can breathe into that space, we can name how much we miss our departed colleagues and friends, feel the depth of that sadness — and also creatively dream of the way they live among us in memory and impact.”
The names of these late Bates faculty and staff were read at the service:
- Albert Fereshetian, Athletics
- Frank Ford, Facility Services
- Normand Gagne, Facility Services
- David Gaynor, Facility Services
- Sue Houchins, Africana
- Pamela Johnson, Art and Visual Culture
- Frank Lyons, Campus Safety
- Dana Mulholland, Athletics
- Eric Polley, Facility Services
- William Pope L., Art and Visual Culture
- Kenneth Smith Sr., Dining, Catering, Conferences, and Events
- Richard Spalding, Facility Services
Categories Academic Life Faculty and staff
