Convocation 2025 Welcome

I am so happy to be with all of you as we begin the academic year! Seeing so many familiar faces after a summer apart, welcoming our new members of the faculty, and most especially, welcoming our newest students is one of my favorite moments of the year. Class of 2029 and new transfers students--we are all so excited that you are here!

I hope that your move to Brunswick has gone smoothly, and that you’ve already begun to know  one another and to learn more about Bowdoin from the wide array of orientation events that our amazing staff has organized for you.

This is a big transition, and while I know it can be overwhelming, please know that you have so many people - family, classmates, faculty, and staff - rooting for you and working to make Bowdoin your new home. I am one of those people, and I look forward to many opportunities to get to know you over the next months and years.

I want to use my few moments today to talk about three things: about this particular moment in higher education in general; about my pride about the particular ways that Bowdoin is responding to, shaping, and transcending this moment; and about the ways that I know that everyone in this room is going to contribute to the shared project that is Bowdoin College.

I’ll begin by briefly acknowledging the current headwinds confronting higher education. You’ll be familiar with these, of course, so I’ll just summarize them to say that our core beliefs in academic freedom, independent research and teaching, shared governance, diversity, and the value of higher education as a public good are being challenged and contested in the courts, in the media, and in public discourse.

These core beliefs shape everything we do, and I am happy to say that Bowdoin is well positioned and ready to face this moment.

How are we doing that? Mostly, we just do it by doing what we have always done. We do the important work of imagining and navigating our way into an unpredictable future by drawing on our deep traditions and commitments to a model of education rooted in the liberal arts; by standing firmly on our belief in the value of living and learning together in a diverse community; and by embracing and generating new ways of thinking and knowing.

Let me describe briefly three examples of what it looks like to recommit to and strengthen what we do. These examples might on the face of it seem very different, but I see them as being deeply connected: our new pollinator garden, our new Hastings Initiative for Artificial Intelligence and Humanity, and the opening of the newly renovated Sills Hall.

This fall, you will see landscapers and students working to convert small patches of lawn into a pollinator habitat. As the gardens mature over several years, colorful and nectar-rich blossoms will cover the area every spring and summer, blossoms that will ultimately help support wasps, bees, butterflies, beetles, and other insects.

Associate Professor of Biology  and Director of the Bowdoin College Scientific Station on Kent Island Patty Jones describes the project this way: “In this moment, where a lot of things feel hopeless climate change wise all this data shows that re-wilding little bits of lawn does have an impact. And it’s something that is pleasurable, aesthetic, relaxing, therapeutic, and ecologically beneficial.”

Also, this fall you'll be able to participate in a series of events, speakers, workshops, campus conversations, and even a hackathon sponsored by our new Hastings Initiative for Artificial Intelligence and Humanity. When we announced this initiative, I describe it as a way to help us think together about what we are going to value in human cognition and what we will want our AI systems to do - or not do - going forward in service to humanity. The initiative has already begun to do that important work.

The Sills Hall renovation represents our enduring commitment to the Humanities. This is more than just a building. New spaces for the teaching and study of Cinema Studies, Classics, Romance languages, and German will allow for new ways of teaching that reflect the best of what we now know about how students learn and how they interact with faculty.

It’s a renovation for a new century of teaching and learning in these fields. I am proud that at a moment when some universities and colleges are cutting back on their commitment to the humanities and particularly the languages, Bowdoin is re-investing in them.

The pollinator garden and the Hastings Initiative and a new home for the languages are three very different expressions of our shared commitment to the liberal arts and the common good.

One is working to make our campus as sustainable as possible, helping plants and insects thrive on the land we share with them; the second is working to ensure that artificial intelligence will serve humanity and that our humanness will thrive in a rapidly changing world that we are only beginning to wrap our heads around, and the third is ensuring that our students will continue to expand their minds and their engagement with our world with the study of languages and cultures.

Each of these gardens-in-the-making express our belief that hard work, curiosity, imagination, patience, and expertise can transform and sustain our world; a belief that is realized every day in labs, seminars, libraries, classrooms, and other spaces across campus.

I have often described the process of what happens in those spaces as the sound of the liberal arts--the sound that is produced when different ideas, different perspectives, different ways of knowing, different disciplinary lenses, different life experiences all come together.

That sound changes every year. It changes as new faculty bring their new perspectives and expertise into the classrooms and labs, and it changes as you, the class of 2029, bring your new questions and experiences into our community. Everyone in this room has an important role to play in contributing to making that sound - the sound of the bright clatter of ideas -  as layered, multi-faceted, and complex as possible. Everyone in this room also has a role to play in listening to and trying to understand that sound: both in the moments when the sound is harmonious and consonant; as well as in the moments when it is dissonant and discordant. 

We need both of those moments to be whole and to grow. Sometimes those discordant moments will resolve themselves; sometimes they will not. I hope you will learn to appreciate both moments for what they each have to give us: in the harmonious moments, seize opportunities to lean into our commonalities and shared understandings and to celebrate the gift of unity; in the dissonant moments, seize opportunities to be curious, to sit with tension and discomfort, and to celebrate the gift of difference.

The liberal arts ask you to linger in ambiguity, to resist the easy answer, to hold multiple truths in mind at once. As a cognitive scientist, I know that the human mind is drawn to certainty like a moth to light. But the most important questions facing us today rarely offer certainty. They require us to weigh probabilities, to listen closely, to tolerate the dissonance before the resolution.

Your time here will—I hope—be full of moments when you think you understand something—only to find a new perspective that changes your view entirely.

I can’t anticipate what forms of harmony and what forms of discordance will shape the sound of this coming year, but I can promise you that I will listen for and learn from both, and I hope the same for and from each of you.

Over these next four years, I hope that each of you will commit to really listening to one another. I hope that you especially listen to the unexpected ideas, and to the ideas that challenge you. I also hope that you will each add your own voice to those conversations with intention—the intention to enrich this shared conversation with your curiosity, your integrity, your willingness to grow.