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Bowdoin College


Bowdoin College is a small, private liberal arts college located in the New England town of Brunswick, Maine. It enrolls just under 1,700 students, all of whom are undergraduates, 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) from Freeport, Maine, 28 miles (45 km) from Portland, Maine, and 131 miles (211 km) from Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to the 200 acre Brunswick campus, Bowdoin also operates a coastal studies center on Orr’s Island 2 in Maine and a scientific field station on Kent Island 3 in the Bay of Fundy.

Contents
1 History
2 Student Life
3 Academics
4 Student Body
5 Athletics
6 Graduate Placement
7 Distinguished Graduates

7.1 Government
7.2 Law
7.3 Arts & Letters
7.4 Science & Medicine
7.5 Athletics
7.6 Business
7.7 Academia
7.8 Honorary

8 Bowdoin in Literature and Film
9 External Links

History

The college was chartered by the legislature of Massachusetts, of which Maine was then a district, in 1794, and was named for former Massachusetts governor James Bowdoin. The first class matriculated in 1802. Although Bowdoin is now non-sectarian, it was initially affiliated with the Congregational Church. Since Bowdoin was initially the easternmost college in the new United States, and thus the first to see the dawn every morning, the College adopted a seal featuring a smiling golden sun in 1798. The crest of the Bowdoin family has also been used since 1811.

Bowdoin is intimately connected with the American Civil War. Some have said the war began and ended in Brunswick, as Harriet Beecher Stowe started writing Uncle Tom's Cabin while her husband was teaching at Bowdoin, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, an alumnus and later president of the college, led the 20th Maine Infantry in a heroic defense at Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg and was responsible for receiving the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House in 1865.

Union General Oliver Otis Howard was also a Bowdoin graduate. After the war, he served as first director of the Freedmen's Bureau, established to assist former slaves, and was later honored in the naming of Howard University. Several Bowdoin alumni fought for the South, and one honorary Bowdoin degree holder served as president of the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis of was U.S. Secretary of War when Bowdoin honored him in 1858. The college turned aside wartime requests that it revoke Davis's honorary degree. Davis's name and those of other Civil War-era alumni appear on bronze tablets in the college's Memorial Hall.

For a time in the late 19th Century, Bowdoin functioned as a small university: besides the college, it operated an engineering school and the Medical School of Maine, whose last class graduated in 1920.

In 1970, the institution stopped requiring SAT scores for admission. In 1971, the first coeducational class matriculated. Just a few years ago the school received national recognition for converting the long-standing fraternities system to "the social house system," under which incoming freshmen are automatically assigned a house affiliation.

Student Life

Roughly 1700 students attend Bowdoin College, nestled in the pine trees of Maine. They study hard during the week and on the weekends enjoy supporting Bowdoin athletic teams, especially against rivals Bates College and Colby College. Activist groups are beginning to gain momentum in light of the rapidly changing world situation, and publications such as Ritalin, a controversial humor magazine; Naked, an opinion/literature mag; and the Disorient and the Patriot, respectively the liberal and conservative newspapers, are reflections of the ever-broadening student perspective. The Bowdoin Orient is the main student newspaper and is the largest one on campus; it claims to be the "oldest continuously published college weekly in the United States." Brunswick doesn't offer a bustling night life for students under 21, but the larger city of Portland is just a half hour away.

The Bowdoin Dining Services has a high reputation, and was rated the best college food service in the country by the Princeton Review in 2003. Bowdoin has also regularly appeared among the annual listings of top-10 national liberal-arts colleges compiled by U.S. News and World Report magazine.

Academics

Bowdoin has a strong academic reputation, and is consistently ranked among the top five or ten liberal arts colleges in the United States by U.S. News and World Report. Although Bowdoin is often associated with Bates and Colby, located in the Maine cities of Lewiston and Waterville, the College actually shares the more applicants with -- in no particular order -- Middlebury, Amherst, Dartmouth, Williams and Brown.

Bowdoin offers majors in Africana Studies, anthropology, art history, Asian Studies, biochemistry, ciology, chemistry, Classics, computer science, economics, English, 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.

Government was the most popular major for every graduating class between 2000 and 2004; biology and economics also appeared among the top five majors every year during that period. Other popular majors include English, history, environmental studies and sociology. For detailed statistics on the prevailance of various majors over time, see the Facts and Figures page on the Bowdoin College website.

A 2003 exposé 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. Although Bowdoin does not require the SAT in admissions, all students must submit a score upon matriculation. For the class of 2008, the 25th-75th percentile ranges for the verbal and math sections of the SAT were 640-740 and 650-720, respectively.

While nearly half of the student body hails from New England -- including around 25% from Massachusetts and 10% from Maine -- the College's reach is increasingly national in scope; New York, California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Illinois, Washington and Colorado are also among the major feeder states. Aproximately 5% of the students are foreign, although nearly a third of these are usually Canadian. 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 to nearly 30%.

Nevertheless, there is still a preppy element at Bowdoin. Among the high schools which usually submit the most applications are Deerfield Academy, Phillips Exeter Academy and public schools in the Boston suburbs of Lexington, Brookline and Newton.

For more information, see the Facts and Figures page on the Bowdoin College website.

Athletics

The Bowdoin Polar Bears -- named for a specimen brought back from the North Pole by Admiral Robert Peary, class of 1888 -- compete in the NCAA Division III New England Small College Athletic Conference, which also includes Amherst, Hamilton, Trinity, Tufts, Wesleyan, Williams, and Maine rivals Bates and Colby (also members of the Colby-Bates-Bowdoin mini-conference). The school's official colors are white and black.

Bowdoin offers thirty varsity teams, including men's teams in baseball, basketball, cross country, football, golf, 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 club teams in rugby, water polo, men's volleyball and ultimate frisbee.

Given the prominence of athletics at Bowdoin -- over 50% of the students play a varsity sport -- there has been some debate about their contribution to the liberal arts experience. Some would like to follow the lead of Williams, which recruits heavily and has historically been dominant in NESCAC and NCAA Division III competition, while others would like to move in the direction of schools like Swarthmore and Oberlin, which have de-emphasized athletics. Bowdoin's track and cross country coach, Peter Slovenski, recently weighed in in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

For more information, see the Athletics page on the Bowdoin College website.

Graduate Placement

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 students who attend top-five programs in business, law and medicine -- ahead of Rice, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Caltech, Virginia and UC Berkeley.

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

Government

Law

Arts & Letters

Science & Medicine

Athletics

  • Fred Tootell 1923, Olympic gold medalist in the hammer throw (1924)
  • Joan Benoit Samuelson 1979, Olympic gold medalist in the marathon (1984)

Business

Academia

  • Nathan Lord 1809, president of Dartmouth College (1828-63)
  • Samuel Harris 1833, president of Bowdoin College (1867-71)
  • Kenneth C.M. Sills 1901, president of Bowdoin College (1918-52)
  • Asa Knowles 1930, president of Northeastern University (1959-75), and namesake of the building which houses the Law School
  • Lawrence Lee Pelletier 1936, president of Allegheny College, and namesake of the school's library
  • Roger Howell, Jr. 1958, Rhodes Scholar and president of Bowdoin College (1969-78)
  • Barry Mills 1972, president of Bowdoin College (2001-present)

Honorary

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."
  • 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.
  • 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 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 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 prequil to Gettysburg. Actor Jeff Daniels reprises his role as Chamberlain; Bowdoin references abound.
  • Kinsey (2004) -- Actor Liam Neeson plays sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, whose father, played by John Lithgow, violently opposes his decision to transfer to Bowdoin from the Stevens Institute of Technology.
  • The Aviator (2004) -- Bowdoin goes unmentioned in this Howard Hughes biopic, but Bowdoin grad Ralph Owen Brewster, played by Alan Alda, has a major role.

External Links

Last updated: 05-13-2005 07:56:04
 
 
     
 
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