- Good afternoon, it is
so good to be with you,
and it is my great pleasure
to welcome all of you
to the 219th Convocation
of Bowdoin College.
Over these two centuries,
our college community has
gathered together in some form
to mark the occasion of
opening the academic year,
but it has never been like this.
We begin today with an invocation
offered by the Reverend Eduardo Pazos,
director of our Rachel
Lord Center for Religious
and Spiritual Life, Eduardo.
- Please join me in a
moment of reflection.
As improbable as it might once seemed,
we are all together today
to celebrate the beginning
of yet another academic year
in the life of our college.
Yes, the last six months have
presented us with great pain,
fear and challenges like no
other time in modern history,
and we have also felt great
joy for the new possibilities
this world is opening up for us.
Class of 2024, may your
next four years here with us
and all the different models of learning
be marked not by fear of the unknown,
but by the certainty
of the joy we do know.
May you know the joy of perseverance,
that resolve to not give up
and keep on going until the end,
the joy of your family members
and loved ones rooting for you from afar,
the joy of learning,
questioning, deconstructing,
and finding new paths,
the joy of discovering
new lands, new questions,
new possibilities that were
unknown to you until now,
the joy that comes from
getting to know yourself,
your strength, beauty, and courage.
May this next part of your
journey be full of grace,
that gentle, compassionate, patient
and kind of view of the
world yourself and others.
May your interactions with your
floor mates and classmates,
both virtual and in person
be surrounded by a cloud
of grace and compassion.
More than ever before,
may you find grace and you're going in
and going out of your learning spaces
as you join others in tents,
dorm rooms, in virtual spaces,
all over our country and our world.
May you find it in your readings,
your assignments and your interactions
with your favorite people on campus.
May you find grace for yourself,
grace to spend time alone when needed,
grace to ask for help,
grace to find new communities
and grace to recognize that our failures
are not a reflection of our identity,
instead they are a
reflection of our persistence
and stamina to learn from
them and keep on going.
And for the next years,
but more specifically for the next season,
may you find the ability to
see yourself as you really are.
May you see your
awesomeness, intelligence,
humor, tenacity, your strength.
May you see
that what you have accomplished
over the last few years
is nothing short of amazing,
and what you will accomplish
in the future will surprise
all of us, including yourself.
May you see that you
carry within yourself,
the strength of your ancestors,
the prayers and thoughts
of your communities,
the longevity of your traditions,
the resilience of the lands you call home
and the hope of your loved
ones for a brighter tomorrow.
May you spend the next
four years journeying
into your own world of self-discovery,
and may you come out in awe
of how remarkable you are.
For the next four years,
may you grow in joy,
grace and self-awareness.
May you grow to see what a
beautiful world we live in
and may you work to protect it
and make it better every single day.
- Thank you, Eduardo.
Good afternoon, I'm Janet Lohmann
and I'm the senior vice president
and dean for student affairs.
Today, I get to share with you
Voices from Bowdoin's Past.
"We are an intimate part
of what we live through."
These words were shared
with the Bowdoin community
by long time English
professor, Herbert Ross Brown
in his 1972 baccalaureate address
on the eve of his retirement.
Professor Brown, who taught
American literature at Bowdoin
for 47 years spent time in his remarks,
reflecting on all he had witnessed
during his time at Bowdoin,
wars, racial strife,
political divisiveness,
and the pain and sorrow that
impact a college community
when the world feels so,
as he expressed it,
"Frustratingly fruitless."
For many of us, today can very much feel
like one of those periods.
In preparing for my remarks for today,
I spent time looking over the voices
from some of the troubled
times in Bowdoin's past
seeking out periods where
the world felt broken
and so full of despair
to try to learn how the people
back then made it through.
What struck me most about this exercise
were the parallels between 1968 and today.
Stories in the Orient that
year are reflections on race,
student activism, the strife of war,
protests and assassinations,
a divisive political election
with a law and order focus
and an overall call to action
in what appeared to be
a society in decline.
Today, our challenges are different
yet stunningly familiar
as we confront a pandemic,
continued racial injustice,
political tension,
economic inequality, and distress,
student activism and calls
for action across many fronts.
In his baccalaureate address in 1968,
then acting president, Atherton Daggett
quoted an unnamed colleague,
someone he valued highly
who as Daggett put it,
"Seemed to me to be a perceptive
and intelligent observer of
the times in which we live."
Daggett recounted that
this colleague was worried
because not since 1860
had the country seem to be
so imminently in danger
of splitting apart.
In regards to life in America
in 1968, Daggett said,
"Passing beyond the
possibility of reconciliation
and accommodation, debate and dialogue,
today's events oftentimes
yield to assertion and accusation."
In 2020, we can imagine these
same words being spoken.
Just like in 1968, we
are in a place of fear,
frustration, sadness and at times despair,
as we witness many of the same issues
and injustices that were
being faced when Daggett spoke
accompanied this time
by a worldwide pandemic
that has infected millions and
killed over 850,000 people,
more than 180,000 in our country alone.
With all of this,
it can feel impossible
to consider next steps,
and yet we will.
Herbert Ross' Brown's
observations nearly 50 years ago,
remind us that the world faces
challenges over and over,
and yet we rise and find a way through.
We won't kid ourselves, we
won't solve every problem,
but we find our way individually
and collectively by learning
from the mistakes we've made,
and by imagining something
better, more humane,
something gentler and something stronger,
something that gives us
a new level of connection
and commitment to the world
and to our relationships with one another.
"We are an intimate part
of what we live through," said Brown.
Our job today is not merely
to survive these times,
but to make real progress using
our knowledge of the past,
our dreams for the future
and our commitment to the common good.
We will always remember
where we were in 2020,
but it's what we did that will matter.
Be well, and thank you for listening.
- Thank you, Janet.
As we officially open the academic year,
it is customary of Convocation
to invite a member of our
faculty to share insight
into an important issue.
Professor of chemistry and biochemistry,
Danielle Dube focuses much of her research
on the study of sugars that coat the cells
that compose each and every one of us.
Professor Dube will tell you
that the sugars cover the
surfaces of all the cells
in our body,
and that there are structures
provide meaningful information
about cellular identity.
She brings her scholarship
about such things
into the courses she
teaches on chemical biology.
This afternoon, she weaves aspects of that
into what promises to be a compelling talk
comprising three themes, her
path as a woman in science,
the imposter syndrome with
which she has struggled,
and the role community has
played in sustaining her.
She calls it "Understanding
and Dismantling Structures,
One Bacterium at a Time."
Please join me in welcoming
Professor Danielle Dube.
- Thank you, President Rose
for the opportunity to speak here today.
I am honored to address the faculty,
staff and students who compose a community
that I am privileged to be a part of.
As we start the academic year
and embark upon your college career,
we are doing so in ways we
could not have conceived of
a year ago.
We are being asked to navigate
near continuous uncertainty
in the face of imperfect information.
We are being asked to take steps forward
with no clear sense of
where they will lead,
and we are being asked to do so
while dealing with profound
societal challenges
revolving around human health,
the economy and social and racial justice.
I believe we all have
important perspectives
on these subjects,
and I'll share mine
as a professor of
chemistry and biochemistry.
I am an experimentalists
who develops chemical tools
to study the molecular basis
of human health and disease.
My research focuses on
disease causing bacteria,
which have armor that protects them
and allows them to proliferate.
I seek to understand the
molecular structures of that armor
so I can dismantle it,
ultimately transforming these
disease causing bacteria
into harmless ones.
I am driven day after
day to head to the lab
where my students and I navigate
near continuous uncertainty.
Like all experimentalists,
most of my experiments
fail as I undertake them
in the face of imperfect information.
I choose though to explore the unknown
because of what this work could lead to.
Successes rare as they may be,
shed a pinprick of light on the unknown,
and added together,
these pinpricks of light from my own work,
from the work of countless
others who came before me,
from work alongside me at Bowdoin
and at other institutions,
and from the work of
those who will come after,
will form an image,
a small piece of the puzzle
that can be leveraged to
tackle infectious disease.
I undertake work that I find
personally meaningful each day,
but I did not end up on
this path with a clear plan
or with self-confidence.
When I began college,
becoming a chemistry professor
was not something I even considered.
I liked science and majored in biology
bound for medical school.
As I took courses, though,
I struggled with feelings
of inadequacy, self-doubt,
and the fear that others
would realize I was a fraud.
I now know this has a
name, imposter syndrome.
These feelings were heightened
when I took an infamous pre-med
course, organic chemistry.
I was so scared for that
class, I prepared for failure.
But the most unexpected thing happened,
I loved organic chemistry.
That class changed the way I saw things.
It made molecules come alive for me,
it helped me understand why
chemical building blocks
react the way that they do
and how having this predictive
level of information
is instrumental in
crafting life saving drugs.
I was hooked.
The following summer,
I had another transformative experience.
As I undertook my first research project,
studying coral reefs
off the coast of Mexico,
I had the all inspiring realization
that science is not a collection
of facts in a textbook.
It is instead of process
rooted in exploring the unknown
seeking answers to questions
and having those answers
reveal more questions.
The biggest surprise was that even me,
a college student on a coral reef
in a remote part of Mexico,
even I could help
contribute to the unknown
by asking questions no one had before
and collecting data to try to answer them.
These two experiences fueled me
and they formed the
intellectual foundation
for where I am now.
Despite these amazing
experiences in college,
my path forward was not written in stone.
I still questioned whether
I belonged in science.
On my first day of graduate
school at Berkeley,
where I set out to pursue
my PhD in chemistry,
I looked around the room
filled with 50 other incoming students,
and I felt like I did not belong.
My sense of security
and value had crumbled.
What was I thinking that
I might belong here,
that I might be capable
of pursuing this path.
I sat next to a woman,
another first year PhD chemistry student,
then other women sat nearby.
This group of women went
to dinner that night.
Dinner became a weekly event
and our dinners transformed
into daily lunches.
I found myself in an uplifting
and supportive group of
women chemistry students
who faced the same fears
who all felt like imposters.
We helped each other realize
that we could do it even
in the face of repeated
experimental setbacks
and self-doubt.
Even now in moments of insecurity,
we still prop each other up.
Had I not met them,
things could have gone differently.
I might not have been able
to muster the strength
to repeatedly faced my fears.
Though the science and
the process gripped me,
it was the community
within science that kept me
in this field that has taught
me to negotiate my self-doubt.
Based on the data as a
woman chemistry professor,
I am an anomaly.
Though women earn 50% of
chemistry bachelor's degrees
and 41% of chemistry doctorates,
only 20% of chemists of faculty
in chemistry departments
in the U.S. are women.
It's not all bad news.
Women with female PhD supervisors
are much more likely to become academics
than those with male PhD advisors.
I count myself among the fortunate
as my research mentors in college,
during my PhD and during
my postdoc were brilliant
and supportive women.
Had I not worked with them,
things could have gone differently.
At Bowdoin, I have been part
of an amazing support network
of faculty, friends, and
colleagues, both men and women.
These relationships have helped to buoy me
for countless challenges.
My support network has
continued to foster my growth
and successes, even in
the face of struggles.
Some friends from my PhD
network were not as lucky.
They found themselves
in toxic environments
that quenched their enthusiasm
rather than bolster it.
That could have happened to me.
Although I have been successful,
I still doubt myself and my capabilities.
I have been shaped by society
in ways that make me
constantly questioned my value
in my chosen profession.
My imposter syndrome hasn't gone away.
It crops up often, though
less often than it once did.
When I give a talk at a
conference in a session
with faculty from Harvard
and MIT who I idolize,
I wonder how I ended up
on the invitation list.
When I serve on National Institutes
of Health grant review panels
as one of two women in the room of 20
and the only one from an
undergraduate institution,
I wonder why I'm there.
Sometimes I'm still petrified.
I have over time learned
to navigate the fear,
acknowledge it, face it,
and use what I have learned
to guide my students
as they enter the field
and push it forward.
Though my work began with seeking
to dismantle the structures
that bolstered disease causing bacteria,
with growing awareness,
my focus has turned to
much larger structures
that need to be dismantled.
I am a white woman from
suburban New Jersey
from comfortable socioeconomic class
with parents with advanced degrees.
I recognize that my experiences,
my feelings of imposter syndrome,
my need to find a community,
my search for mentors who look like me
are the experiences of someone who
in many ways is in a position
of power and privilege.
My point is not that I am a success
and that you should try to be like me,
rather my point is that
even the success stories
that we point to for
diversifying our academic field
and our faculty are barbed,
and for each success story,
there are countless more failures.
We have much to learn to get this right,
to create an environment that
fosters a sense of community
and belonging, where we elevate the voices
that society has muted
because each of us has
something to contribute.
There are those of us
who don't want to admit
that these power structures exist,
that where they are is driven
by luck as much as hard work.
No matter how insignificant we might feel,
how much we might doubt ourselves
or how others might perceive our voices,
we have a set of experiences
that allow us to bring a
unique lens to the table.
Illumination from each of these lenses
sheds a pinprick of light
that when added together,
provide an image and path
that will help move society forward
as we tackle profound
structural challenges
revolving around human health, the economy
and social and racial justice.
Together, we can dismantle the structures
that provide armor to
powers that seek to justify
and maintain inequity.
Perhaps this moment will
give us an opportunity
to deeply reflect upon
problematic structures that exist
that shape our experiences,
that elevate some individuals
and see doubt in others
and provide an opportunity
for us to create better,
stronger to support structures
at a time when the old ones
are showing their weaknesses.
As you begin the academic year,
I urge you to face challenges
and uncertainty head-on,
to find and create meaning in your days,
to foster connections and community
and to fuel teach and uplift
each other, good luck.
- Thank you, Danielle.
Those were remarkable words.
Thank you for sharing them with us.
I wanna begin this afternoon
by thanking my faculty
and staff colleagues for
all of your amazing work
over the past six months,
work that has brought us to today,
the opening of our college.
I wanna welcome our new students,
our first year and transfers.
We are so pleased that you
have joined our community.
And I wanna welcome back
our returning students
most of whom, unfortunately
are not with us on campus.
Now, while this ceremony
has changed over time
and has been shaped by the moment,
there is little question
that this year's convocation
is unlike any other in our history
as is almost everything else
that we will do this year.
That said, while a great
deal will be different,
our commitments to a great
liberal arts education
to a community dedicated
to serving the common good
and to the care and kindness
we show to one another remain steadfast.
I've entitled my remarks
for this afternoon Denial.
How many of us know where the Spanish flu
most likely originated?
This was the last great pandemic,
little over a century ago.
How many know what R-naught
is, why it's important
or why safety and
efficacy are both critical
to the successful development
and deployment of a vaccine
or what the implications
are of aerosolization
of a virus on safety practices?
How many know the gap in
infant mortality rates
between white Americans
and black Americans,
the origins and motivations
of the Lost Cause movement,
the implications of the
idea of the model minority,
the theory of eugenics and
the policies that it fostered,
the facts of redlining
residential segregation,
and racial profiling,
and just to bring it all together,
how many of us are
aware of the higher risk
to serious outcomes for
black and brown Americans
from COVID-19 or the utter devastation
that the virus has wrought
on the Navajo Nation?
And what is the point of these questions?
Why am I talking about the coronavirus
and racism in the same breath?
You've heard me discuss
since the late spring
that we are in the midst of two pandemics,
one of COVID-19 and the other of racism.
They both have profound
implications for health,
death, jobs, and opportunity,
and they reveal much that is flawed
about how government works,
leadership that is lacking
and the challenges facing our democracy.
Although to be sure, there've
been some amazing examples
of what can work and what
true leadership looks like.
And I bring together the virus and racism,
not because they both
represent grave threats,
which they do,
but because at the root
of our inability to
successfully deal with them
or to get to a solid path to
dealing with them is denial,
the deliberate willingness
to dismiss and ignore data,
facts, and truth.
Instead driven by a desire
to buttress a chosen ideology
at all costs,
misinformation and lies are
substituted in place of facts,
data, and truth,
and the costs are public
safety, justice, and equality.
False narratives, some of which have been
in play for a very long time,
include racial differences in
intelligence and work ethic.
Immigrants are taking our jobs,
patients of color don't
follow medical advice,
as well as white patients,
Asian-Americans are responsible
for the coronavirus.
They include the idea that
the virus will disappear,
that masks are unnecessary.
The asymptomatic individuals
do not need to be tested
and that young people can get the virus,
or if they do, they won't get too sick.
These tropes are driven by a
willful desire to ignore facts
and by a disdain for the intellectuals
and elites who traffic in them,
because they challenge an ideology.
Now, sadly, this problem
of denial is far from new,
nor is it an issue only in our country,
but in today's hyper partisan
political environment
seems to have made it even worse,
and with the profound issues we face,
the stakes are higher than ever.
Opportunity, the quality of life,
health and survival and
the cohesion of society
and the system of government are at risk.
So what does that have to do
with us, with Bowdoin College?
And I'd suggest that there
are at least two things.
The first is that as citizens,
we have a duty to engage this fight,
to battle and to put down COVID-19,
to battle and to put down racism
and to perpetuate our democracy.
This requires active engagement,
a desire for the facts
and a willingness to fight for
truth as a central guidepost.
We need to know what is true,
be able to distinguish
facts and falsehoods,
to actively embrace the power
and importance of new
knowledge and new facts
and the search for what is true.
And we need to call out stale
information, misleading data,
and lies for what they are.
Increasingly our societies
become one of denial
where facts and truth are swept aside
by a predetermined view
or political position.
Decisions, policy, and even elections
are driven by flawed insights,
wishful thinking and deception.
As Adrian Bardon writes
in Scientific American,
"Americans increasingly exists
in highly polarized
informationally insulated
ideological communities occupying their
own information universes."
Pushing hard against this
is an obligation that we
each share as citizens.
And then there is the
mission of our college.
Many of you have heard me say
or read something that
I've written on my view
of the three essential goals
of a great liberal arts education
to help each of us to
live a meaningful life,
to help each of us to find success
and satisfaction in our work,
and to be able to participate
meaningfully in civic life.
The idea of the liberal arts,
not withstanding how that
term has become politicized
and weaponized more recently
has its origins in antiquity
and is an education intended
to prepare one to participate
in civic life and to be
productive and engage citizens
in the debates and decisions of the day.
For generation after generation,
Bowdoin education has
provided our students
with the ability to think critically,
to reason, to learn, to
be nimble intellectually
and to communicate
thoughtfully and persuasively.
We develop in them the
ability to ask hard questions
and this skill and disposition
to avoid assuming that
just because it's on the internet
or said by someone on TV,
that it's true.
This is what we have done at the college
for a very long time.
And it's this liberal arts education
that is exactly what is
required to have the skills
and disposition to understand
and overcome the ugly
and dangerous manifestations of denial.
The stakes have never been higher.
We have never needed
liberally educated people
more than we do now.
And I would suggest that we
have never needed Bowdoin,
and the many other schools like Bowdoin
more than we do now.
To our students,
I would ask that you think about this
as you make your way
through your time here.
Think about what you heard
from the three colleagues
that have shared the stage with me today,
the power and the profound
insights both into intellectual,
emotional, and from the soul
and how important they are
in the work that you will do.
The education that you are
privileged to receive here
has great instrumental power,
and it will help you to change the world.
To my faculty and staff
colleagues, thank you.
Thank you for continuing
a long history of creating
and delivering a Bowdoin education,
one that makes a difference.
By the way,
the best evidence indicates
that the Spanish flu
had its origins in Kansas.
And with that, I declare the college open
for this academic year, thank you.
And now it is my great pleasure
to introduce two of
Bowdoin's acapella groups,
the Bear Tones and
Miscellania who will lead us
in a singing the alma mater
"Raise Songs to Bowdoin."
♪ Raise songs to Bowdoin ♪
♪ Praise her fame ♪
♪ And sound abroad her glorious name ♪
♪ To Bowdoin, Bowdoin lift your song ♪
♪ And may the music echo long ♪
♪ O'er whispering pines and campus fair ♪
♪ With sturdy might filling the air ♪
♪ Bowdoin, from birth ♪
♪ Our nurturer and friend ♪
♪ To thee we pledge
our love again, again ♪
♪ While now amid thy halls we stay ♪
♪ And breathe thy spirit day by day ♪
♪ Oh may we thus full worthy be ♪
♪ To march in that proud company ♪
♪ Of poets, leaders and each one ♪
♪ Who brings thee fame
by deeds well done ♪
♪ Bowdoin, from birth ♪
♪ Our nurturer and friend ♪
♪ To thee we pledge our
love again, again. ♪
- Fantastic.
Thank you for joining us today
for this celebration of
the opening of our college.
And I wanna thank Reverend Pazos,
Dean Lohmann, Professor Dube.
Thank you for your remarkable,
thoughtful, heartfelt remarks.
I wish all of our
students, faculty and staff
a wonderful start to this
most unusual academic year.
