Bowdoin College
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{{Infobox_University |name = BOWDOIN COLLEGE |image = Image:Bowdoin College Seal.GIF |motto = Ut Aquila Versus Coelum ("As an eagle towards the sky") |established = June 24, 1794 |type = Private |president= Barry Mills |city = Brunswick |state = Maine |country = USA |undergrad = 1,625 |postgrad = 0 |staff= 181 |campus = Suburban |free_label = Athletics |mascot = Polar Bear |free = 30 varsity teams, 6 club teams |website= www.bowdoin.edu}}
Bowdoin College is a private liberal arts college, founded in 1794, located in the coastal New England town of Brunswick, Maine. It enrolls approximately 1,660 students and has been coeducational since 1971. Bowdoin offers 33 majors and 4 additional minors; the academic year consists of two four-course semesters, and the student-faculty ratio is 10:1. Brunswick is located on the shores of Casco Bay and the Androscoggin River, 12 miles (19 km) north of Freeport, Maine, 28 miles north of Portland, Maine, and 131 miles (211 km) north of Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to its Brunswick campus, Bowdoin also operates a 118 acre (478,000 m²) coastal studies center on Orrs Island * in Harpswell, Maine and a 200 acre (809,000 m²) scientific field station on Kent Island * in the Bay of Fundy.
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History
Image:Bowdoin Crest.jpgBowdoin College was chartered in 1794 by Governor Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, of which Maine was then a district, and was named for former Massachusetts governor James Bowdoin, whose son James Bowdoin III was an early benefactor. Although Bowdoin is now non-sectarian, it was initially affiliated with the Congregational Church. At the time of its founding, it was the easternmost college in the United States.
Bowdoin came into its own in the 1820s, a decade in which Maine became an independent state as a result of the Missouri Compromise and the College graduated a number of its most famous alumni, including future United States President Franklin Pierce, class of 1824, and writers Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, both of whom graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1825.
Bowdoin's connections to the Civil War have prompted some to quip that the war "began and ended" in Brunswick. Harriet Beecher Stowe, "the little lady who started this big war," started writing her influential anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin in Bowdoin's Appleton Hall while her husband was teaching at the College, and General Joshua Chamberlain, a Bowdoin alumnus and professor, was responsible for receiving the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House in 1865. Chamberlain, a Medal of Honor winner who later served as governor of Maine and president of Bowdoin, distinguished himself at Gettysburg, where he led the 20th Maine in its valiant defense of Little Round Top.
There are other Civil War connections as well: General Oliver Otis Howard, class of 1850, led the Freedmen's Bureau after the war and later founded Howard University; Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew, class of 1837, was responsible for the formation of the famous 54th Massachusetts; and William P. Fessenden 1823 and Hugh McCulloch 1827 both served as Secretary of the Treasury during the Lincoln Administration. After the war, Bowdoin contended that a higher percentage of its alumni fought in the war than that of any other college in the North -- and not only for the Union. In fact, Confederate President Jefferson Davis held an honorary degree from Bowdoin, which he received while United States Secretary of War in 1858.
Although Bowdoin's Medical School of Maine closed its doors in 1920, the College is currently known for its particularly strong programs in the natural sciences. While Bowdoin's best-known alumnus in the sciences is the controversial entomologist-turned-sexologist Alfred Kinsey, class of 1916, the College's reputation in this area was cemented in large part by the Arctic explorations of Admiral Robert E. Peary, class of 1877, and Donald B. MacMillan, class of 1898. Peary lead the first successful expedition to the North Pole in 1908, and MacMillan, a member of Peary's crew, became famous in his own right as he explored Greenland, Baffin Island and Labrador in the schooner Bowdoin between 1908 and 1954. Bowdoin's Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum * honors the two explorers, and the College's mascot, the Polar Bear, was chosen after MacMillan donated a particularly large specimen to his alma mater in 1917.
Following in the footsteps of President Pierce and House Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed, class of 1860, several 20th century Bowdoin graduates have assumed prominent positions in national government while representing the Pine Tree State. Wallace H. White, Jr., class of 1899, served as Senate Minority Leader from 1944-1947 and Senate Majority Leader from 1947-1949; George J. Mitchell, class of 1954, served as Senate Majority Leader from 1989-1995 before assuming a prominent role in the Northern Ireland peace process; and William Cohen, class of 1962, spent twenty-five years in the House and Senate before being appointed Secretary of Defense in the Clinton Administration. Maine's First Congressional District, today held by Tom Allen, class of 1967, has been christened the "Bowdoin seat" due to its long occupation by graduates of the College. A total of eleven Bowdoin graduates have ascended to the Maine governorship, and three graduates of the College currently sit on the state's highest court.
Over the last several decades, Bowdoin College has modernized dramatically. In 1970, it became one of a very limited number of selective schools to make the SAT optional in the admissions process, and in 1971, after nearly 180 years as a small men's college, Bowdoin admitted its first class of women. Bowdoin also abolished fraternities in the late 1990s, replacing them with a system of college-owned social houses. Recent developments include the 2001 appointment of Barry Mills, class of 1972, as the fifth alumnus president of the College, and a 2002 decision by the faculty to change the grading system so that it incorporated plus and minus grades.
Academics
Bowdoin has a strong academic reputation, and is consistently ranked among the top ten liberal arts colleges in the United States by U.S. News and World Report. (In 2006, Bowdoin ranked 6th, behind Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Wellesley, and Carleton, and tied with Pomona. *) Although Bowdoin is often compared to Bates and Colby, located in the Maine cities of Lewiston and Waterville, it shares more applicants with Amherst, Brown, Dartmouth, Middlebury and Williams.
Bowdoin offers majors in Africana Studies, Anthropology, Art History, Asian Studies, Biochemistry, Sociology, Chemistry, Classics, Computer science, Economics, English, Environmental Studies, French, Geology, German, Government, History, Latin American Studies, Mathematics, Music, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Physics and Astronomy, Psychology, Religion, Russian, Sociology, Spanish, Visual Arts and Women's Studies. In addition, the College offers minors in Theatre, Dance, Education, Film Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Studies.
The Government Department, whose prominent professors include Paul Franco, Richard E. Morgan, Chris Potholm and Jean Yarbrough, was ranked the top small college political science program in the world by researchers at the London School of Economics in 2003. * Government was the most popular major for every graduating class between 2000 and 2004.
A 2003 exposé [1] in The Bowdoin Orient revealed that the departments with the most rampant grade inflation included theatre and dance, women's studies, and sociology; those with the least grade inflation included physics, economics, philosophy, mathematics and government.
Student Body
Bowdoin's acceptance rate has hovered around 25% for the last five years, making it one of the most selective small colleges in the United States. Although Bowdoin does not require the SAT in admissions, all students must submit a score upon matriculation. The middle 50% SAT range for the verbal and math sections of the SAT is 640-730 and 650-710, respectively — numbers which include the scores of those students who did not submit during the admissions process.
While a significant portion of the student body hails from New England — including nearly 25% from Massachusetts and 10% from Maine — recent classes have drawn from an increasingly national pool. Although Bowdoin once had a reputation for homogeneity, inspiring snide comments in college guides, an aggressive diversity campaign has increased the percentage of non-white students in recent classes to 23%.
Student life
Recalling his days at Bowdoin in a recent interview, Professor Richard E. Morgan '59 described student life at the then-all-male school as "monastic," and noted that "the only things to do were either work or drink." (This is corroborated by the Official Preppy Handbook, which in 1980 ranked Bowdoin the number two drinking school in the country, behind Dartmouth.) These days, Morgan observed, the College offers a far broader array of recreational opportunities: "If we could have looked forward in time to Bowdoin's standard of living today, we would have been astounded." *
Bowdoin is particularly well-known for its dining services, which the Princeton Review has ranked first and second in the country in recent years. * The College has two major dining halls, one of which was renovated in the late 1990s, and every academic year begins with a lobster bake outside Farley Fieldhouse. Bowdoin also does well in other lifestyle categories; in 2004 it ranked 10th in dorm quality and 14th for quality of life. *
Since abolishing Greek fraternities in the late 1990s, Bowdoin has switched to a system in which entering students are assigned a "social house" affiliation correlating with their first-year dormitory. First-year students who live in Moore Hall are affiliated with Baxter House, those who live in Hyde Hall are associated with Howell House, and so on. The social houses are physical buildings around campus which host parties and other events throughout the year. Those students who choose not to live in their affiliated house retain their affiliation and are considered members throughout their Bowdoin career.
Bowdoin's student newspaper, The Bowdoin Orient, is the oldest continuously-published college weekly in the United States. * The largest student group on campus is the Outing Club, which leads canoing, kayaking, rafting, camping and backpacking trips throughout Maine *. The Meddiebempsters, Bowdoin's oldest a cappella group and the third oldest collegiate a cappella group in the nation, delight audiences with their performances; the Meddies were well known after World War II for performing at numerous USO shows in Europe. Men's ice hockey is the most popular spectator sport, with hundreds of students turning out for games against arch-rival Colby. For more information on participation in club and varsity sports, see the Athletics section below.
Athletics
The Bowdoin Polar Bears compete in the NCAA Division III New England Small College Athletic Conference, which also includes Amherst, Conn College, Hamilton, Middlebury, Trinity, Tufts, Wesleyan, Williams, and Maine rivals Bates and Colby. The College's official color is white, though black is traditionally employed as a complement.
Bowdoin offers thirty varsity teams, including men's teams in baseball, basketball, cross country, football, ice hockey, lacrosse, Nordic skiing, soccer, squash, swimming, tennis, and track, and women's teams in field hockey, golf, ice hockey, lacrosse, Nordic skiing, soccer, softball, squash, swimming, tennis, track, and volleyball. The sailing team is co-ed. There are also intercollegiate and club teams in men's and women's rowing, men's and women's rugby, water polo, men's volleyball and men's and women's ultimate frisbee. Recent NESCAC champions include men's cross country (2001, 2002), women's basketball (2001-2005), women's ice hockey (2002, 2004) and women's field hockey (2001,2005); recent NCAA tournament appearances include women's basketball (Elite Eight, 2002, 2003, 2005; Final Four, 2004), women's ice hockey (Final Four, 2002, 2003; Elite Eight, 2004, 2005), and women's field hockey (Final Four, 2005).
In addition to the outdoor athletic fields, the College has indoor and outdoor tracks, a swimming pool, squash courts, an ice hockey rink, a rowing boathouse, several basketball courts, indoor and outdoor tennis courts, an independent weight room with 5 treadmills for the entire student and faculty population, elliptical machines, and a new astroturf field.
Postgraduate Placement
In 2006, Bowdoin was named a "Top Producer of Fulbright Awards for American Students" by the Institute of International Education. *
In 2003, the Wall Street Journal ranked Bowdoin College among the top twenty colleges and universities in the United States based on the percentage of alums who attend a "top five" graduate program in business, law or medicine — ahead of a number of highly-ranked universities, including Rice, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Caltech, Virginia, Notre Dame, Emory, UC Berkeley, Tufts and Washington University. *
Between 1980 and 1999, the most popular business schools for Bowdoin graduates were those at (1) Harvard, (2) Northwestern, (3) Dartmouth, (4) Pennsylvania, (5) Boston University, (6) Chicago, (7) Babson, (8) Northeastern, (9) New York University and (10) Columbia; the most popular law schools were those at (1) Maine, (2) Boston College, (3) Boston University, (4) Harvard, (5) New York University, (6) Suffolk, (7) Columbia, (8) Virginia, (9) Georgetown and (10) Northeastern; and the most popular medical schools were those at (1) Tufts, (2) Vermont, (3) Dartmouth, (4) Boston University, (5) Rochester, (6) Harvard, (7) Massachusetts, (8) Cornell, (9) Yale and (10) Brown.
For more information, see the "Facts and Figures" page on the Bowdoin College website. *
Distinguished Graduates and Faculty
Famous Bowdoin graduates include U.S. President Franklin Pierce (1824), the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1825), the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne (1825), Civil War hero Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (1852), U.S. House Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed (1860), Arctic explorer Admiral Robert Peary (1877), sex researcher Alfred Kinsey (1916), U.S. Senator George Mitchell (1954), U.S. Senator and Secretary of Defense William Cohen (1962), American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault (1973), Olympic gold medalist Joan Benoit Samuelson (1979), and Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings (1983).
For a more complete list of famous alumni and faculty, see the list of Bowdoin College people.
Bowdoin in Literature and Film
- Fanshawe (1828) -- This Nathaniel Hawthorne novel, published only three years after his graduation from Bowdoin, is set at a small college which bears a striking resemblance to his alma mater.
- "Morituri Salutamus" (1875) -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote this poem for his 50th Bowdoin reunion, and recited it on that occasion. One famous passage recalls the College: "O ye familiar scenes,--ye groves of pine / That once were mine and are no longer mine, -- / Thou river, widening through the meadows green / To the vast sea, so near and yet unseen, -- / Ye halls, in whose seclusion and repose / Phantoms of fame, like exhalations, rose / And vanished,--we who are about to die / Salute you; earth and air and sea and sky / And the Imperial Sun that scatters down / His sovereign splendors upon grove and town." *
- M*A*S*H (1968, 1970) -- In both the book and film, the character Hawkeye Pierce, played by actor Donald Sutherland, is said to have played football at Androscoggin College, a fictional school based on the alma mater of author H. Richard Hornberger, Bowdoin class of 1945.
- The Killer Angels (1975) -- This historical novel by Michael Shaara, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, focuses in large part on the role played by Bowdoin graduate and professor Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain at the Battle of Gettysburg.
- Glory (1989) -- Actor Alan North plays Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew, class of 1837, in this film about the 54th Massachusetts.
- Gettysburg (1993) -- Actor Jeff Daniels plays Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain in this movie based on The Killer Angels. There is at least one reference to Chamberlain's academic career at Bowdoin, which he abandoned to lead the 20th Maine.
- The Man Without a Face (1993) -- Parts of this Mel Gibson movie were filmed on campus.
- The Cider House Rules (1994) -- In this John Irving novel, a Bowdoin-educated doctor forges a Bowdoin diploma for a young protégé. This role was played by actor Michael Caine in the film version.
- The Sopranos (1999) -- In an episode entitled "College," Tony Soprano and his daughter Meadow visit Colby, where Tony kills a former associate, and Bowdoin, where he reads an inscription paraphrasing Hawthorne's warning that "no man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true." * Tony's daughter is ultimately waitlisted at Bowdoin and ends up attending Columbia.
- Where the Heart Is (2000) -- The main character in this movie, played by actress Natalie Portman, falls in love with a Bowdoin man. The film, which has a scene "at Bowdoin," is based on a novel of the same name.
- Gods and Generals (2003) -- This film, based on a historical novel of the same name, is a prequel to Gettysburg. Actor Jeff Daniels reprises his role as Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.
- Kinsey (2004) -- Actor Liam Neeson plays sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, class of 1916, whose father opposes his decision to transfer to Bowdoin.
- The Aviator (2004) -- 1909 Bowdoin grad and U.S. Senator Owen Brewster, played by actor Alan Alda, plays a major role in this Howard Hughes biopic.
Bowdoin Trivia
- With approximately 1,625 undergraduate students, Bowdoin is the second-smallest school in the New England Small College Athletic Conference. (The smallest, Amherst College, enrolls 1,600; the largest, Tufts University, enrolls 4,800.)
- Bowdoin's chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, which was founded in 1825, is the nation's fifth oldest. Among those who have been inducted to the Maine Alpha chapter as undergraduates include Nathaniel Hawthorne (1825), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1825), Robert E. Peary (1877), Owen Brewster (1909), Harold Hitz Burton (1909), Paul Douglas (1913), Alfred Kinsey (1916), Thomas R. Pickering (1953), and Lawrence B. Lindsey (1976).
- Bowdoin graduates have led all three branches of the federal government, including both houses of Congress. Franklin Pierce 1826 was America's fourteenth President; Melville Weston Fuller 1853 served as Chief Justice of the United States; Thomas Brackett Reed 1860 was twice elected Speaker of the House of Representatives; and Wallace H. White, Jr. 1899 and George J. Mitchell 1954 both served as Majority Leader of the United States Senate.
- In the early years of the Republic, students who had received degrees from one institution of higher learning could receive reciprocal degrees from another. In 1806, apparently concerned that they might need further credentials, 13 Harvard College graduates also took Bowdoin degrees.