“To be at home in all lands and all ages; to count Nature a familiar acquaintance, and Art an intimate friend; to gain a standard for the appreciation of other men’s work and the criticism of your own; to carry the keys of the world’s library in your pocket, and feel its resources behind you in whatever task you undertake; to make hosts of friends among the men of your own age who are to be leaders in all walks of life; to lose yourself in generous enthusiasms and cooperate with others for common ends; to learn manners from students who are gentlemen, and form character under professors who are Christians,—this is the offer of the college for the best four years of your life.”
President William DeWitt Hyde, seventh president of Bowdoin College, The College Man and the College Woman, 1906.
Our fourth Preliminary of the Bowdoin Project, “Bowdoin’s History from 1871 to 1952,” is the second of four installments which will trace the history of the college from its founding to the present day. This installment focuses on President Joshua Chamberlain’s precarious attempts to modernize the curriculum; it recounts President William DeWitt Hyde’s re-conceptualization of Bowdoin’s identity in response to the ascendance of the American research university in the late 19th century; and it highlights President Kenneth Sills’s dedication to keeping Bowdoin a liberal arts institution in the face of two world wars and the Great Depression.
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Since September 2011, NAS has been conducting an in-depth, ethnographic study of Bowdoin College in Maine. We asked, “what does Bowdoin teach?” and examined Bowdoin’s formal curriculum, its residential and student life policies, and its co-curricular and extra-curricular activities. We have dedicated a page on our website to the Bowdoin Project. The full report will be published there in April. In the meantime, we will continue posting a series of Preliminaries which will provide context for the report.
