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Eddie’s Steady Influence The Spring issue mentions briefly Edward Aldrich ’35, who helped the Outing Club mark the last section of the Appalachian Trail in Maine (“Happy Outing,” page 59). By a very simple act, “Eddie” Aldrich changed my life. He was a very good amateur golfer for whom I had caddied many times, and he also owned a haberdashery store named Edward’s Men’s Shop, which was frequented by my big brother, Bill, who also provided insurance for Eddie. One day, Bill was in the shop on business, and Eddie wanted to know where I was going to attend college. I had applied to only one school, UConn, was admitted, and planned to attend. Eddie told Bill that was not a good idea and that his good friend and classmate Milt Lindholm ’35 would be in town the following week. Eddie arranged for me to be interviewed by Milt in my own home. I was swept off my feet and became one of Milt’s longshots. I met my wife, Beverly Hayne Willsey ’55, at Bates, three of our four sons received Bates degrees, and I’ve enjoyed a modicum of postgraduation involvement at Bates, a lifetime full of memories, and a host of Bates friends — all thanks to a chance encounter with Eddie Aldrich ’35. Lynn Willsey ’54, Glastonbury, Conn. Willsey, a Trustee emeritus, received one of several Bates Best athletics awards in June. See page 58. — Editor
Comment Time An accreditation evaluation team representing the New England Association of Schools and Colleges’ Commission on Institutions of Higher Education will visit Bates Oct. 31–Nov. 3. For the past year and a half, Bates has conducted a self-study addressing the CIHE Standards for Accreditation. During this process, the public is invited to comment on any substantive matter relating to the quality of Bates. Send public comments by Nov. 3 to: Public Comment on Bates College Commission on Institutions of Higher Education New England Association of Schools and Colleges 209 Burlington Road Bedford MA 01730-1433 E-mail: cihe@neasc.org Please note that comments will not be treated as confidential, and should include your name, address, and telephone number. Currently accredited, Bates first achieved accreditation in 1929 and was last reviewed in 2000.
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Questions? Comments? Perhaps it was in ancient Egypt when a teacher first jotted “awkward” and “lacks coherence” on a sheet of papyrus, sending a student on a long, sad walk along the Nile. Ever since, professors’ comments on student papers have carried real power. At a recent campus gathering of the Consortium on High Achievement and Success, professors and writing professionals from a number of liberal arts colleges discussed how writing assignments, including the practice of commenting on student papers, create the kind of conversations that make a student feel connected to college. (But not always. A student presenter recalled the stark feedback on her very first Bates paper. “I felt I had already failed,” she said, adding that professors can do a better job explaining their disciplines’ writing styles.) At Bates, professors tend to accept hard copies of papers and make comments by hand, says Director of Writing Hillory Oakes. She’s encouraging professors to accept papers electronically and make their comments electronically, a practice she admits is “less common at Bates than at comparable schools,” though she doesn’t know why. E-commenting, she adds, “fosters a sense of conversation between the student-writer and the faculty-reader that crammed handwriting scribbled in a margin can’t,” she says. Meanwhile, the old-school method has loyalists like Margaret Soltan, an English professor at George Washington who writes the blog “University Diaries”. Handwritten comments “confirm the authenticity” of a professor’s presence in a student’s life. “This professor and no other...did the student the honor of reading, thinking about, and writing directly to the student, in the professor’s own ink, in the professor’s personal scrawl, on the student’s own paper.” When a student submits a paper, it feels like an offering to the gods. And when the clouds part for the sun, you feel it forever. The poet Pamela Alexander ’70 will always remember this comment from the late Werner Deiman: “This paper coruscates.” (Look it up; she and I had to.) A friend remembers a professor charitably expressing how he saw evidence of promise in a sequence of papers that otherwise regressed. “He could have justifiably blown me away with a single sentence but instead he chose kindness,” said my friend. I arrived in college armed with the literary equivalent of a musket and black powder. I wrote with some power, a style partly picked up from Boston Globe sportswriters like Ray Fitzgerald, and my aim was sometimes off. I’d write about Hedda Gabler like a Globe columnist, humping one note and stuffing random metaphors throughout the paper like toys plucked from a crane game in the vestibule of Wal-Mart. The nadir, or zenith, was using a Buffalo Springfield lyric to define solipsism for a Victorian novel class (or was it Romantic poetry?): “My head was the event of the season.” Over time, professors’ comments helped me calibrate my writing style. Handwritten comments aren’t for everyone. Sociology professor Sawyer Sylvester makes extensive editing marks on papers but eschews long written comments because “my handwriting is atrocious. For the student, it would be an exercise in translation,” he says. “Instead, I’ll ask them to come to my office to talk about the paper.” How old-school. H. Jay Burns, Editor jburns@bates.edu
Editor: H. Jay Burns, jburns@bates.edu Designer: Tammy Roy Caron, tcaron@bates.edu Photography Editor: Phyllis Graber Jensen, pjensen@bates.edu News Editor: Doug Hubley, dhubley@bates.edu Class Notes Editor: Jon Halvorsen, jhalvors@bates.edu Class Notes production: Angela Martin Raven ’96 President of Bates College: Elaine Tuttle Hansen Vice President and Dean of Enrollment and External Affairs: Nancy J. Cable Bates Magazine Advisory Board Marjorie Patterson Cochran ’90, Geraldine FitzGerald ’75, David Foster ’77, Joe Gromelski ’74, Judson Hale Jr. ’82, Jonathan Hall ’83, Christine Johnson ’90, Jon Marcus ’82, Peter Moore ’78 © 2010 Bates College / Office of Communications and Media Relations / 10-221 / 25.5M / printed on recycled paper. Bates Magazine is printed three times a year. Please address letters to the editor, comments, and story ideas to Bates Magazine, Office of Communications and Media Relations, 141 Nichols St., Lewiston ME 04240. e-mail magazine@bates.edu, phone 207-786-6330. Bates Magazine online: home.bates.edu/views/magazine. 108th Series, No. 5, Summer 2010. BATES (USPS 045-160) is published by Bates College, 2 Andrews Road, Lewiston ME 04240, 11 times a year. Periodicals postage paid at Lewiston ME 04240 and other locations. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to BATES, Bates College, 2 Andrews Road, Lewiston ME 04240.
The Bates accreditation process www.bates.edu/ accreditation
Bates Magazine is printed on Forest Stewardship Council–certified paper featuring exceptionally high (55 percent) recycled content, of which 30 percent is postconsumer recycled material. Bates Magazine is printed near campus at family-owned Penmor Lithographers. SUMMER 2010 Bates
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