Good evening.

Let me add my welcome to Bowdoin. We are delighted you are all here, and I hope the sessions will be productive and interesting. And I hope that you will have the chance to enjoy our campus and mid-coast Maine.

As we all know, COFHE’s thoughtful, analytical, rigorous work is unique and incredibly important in considering the challenges for higher education. We’ve been part of COFHE for two years now and, at every level of our college, it has been a fantastic relationship—we have learned a great deal from the work that COFHE does, from our ability to participate in this work and the relationships that have been formed. And our hope is that we give back as much as we get.

I thought I would take a few minutes and share two different thoughts with you. The first is to give you an overview of some of our plans. As a president finishing up my second year, I have moved from a year of listening and learning to be very much in the thick of defining the questions and issues we will want to tackle to remain a preeminent institution over the next ten to fifteen years and beyond. It is exciting work, and a profound opportunity not to be squandered. The second is to touch on an issue that I believe is of collective concern: declining enrollments and majors in the humanities.

So, first, what are we up to here at Bowdoin as we think about the next decade and beyond?

We are focused primarily on questions and issues in three areas. The first is our core mission of the intellectual experience of our students. At the center of this is work that we hope will allow us to be very deliberate in the knowledge, skills, and creative disposition that every student who graduates from Bowdoin ten years from now should possess.

Strongly tied to this is a commitment to strengthening cross-disciplinary work. The best example is our teaching and study of the environment, where I believe we are at the leading edge of liberal arts colleges, with environmental studies, earth and oceanographic studies, Arctic studies, biology, biochemistry, government, economics, philosophy, English, Asian studies, and so forth. Tied to this intellectual foundation are unique physical locations. Our Coastal Studies Center (where we have direct access to the ocean), the Bowdoin Scientific Station on Kent Island in the Bay of Fundy, and our new Roux Center for the Environment that we will be breaking ground on in a few weeks. The environment presents profound issues and problems to be tackled that defy a simply disciplinary approach, and this a program we will be devoting considerable resources to in the years ahead.

The second area of focus is to sustain and fortify our efforts to deal with what I believe are critical twin challenges facing our society at this moment—being an ever more inclusive community to get the most out of the rich diversity we have worked so hard to build. We bring this amazing group of students to campus from every imaginable background—different by race, ethnicity, gender, economic means, sexual orientation, religion, geography, political view—and we ask them to live as an inclusive community without giving them much in the way of rules of the road. Progress, but more work to do. The other part of this is our work to develop in our students the skills and sensibilities to engage in respectful, honest, thoughtful discourse and debate about the most challenging issues of our time, and to confront and engage those ideas that make us uncomfortable and offend us—to be “intellectually fearless.” I have been talking about this since my inaugural address two years ago. In doing this, we are pushing back on a strong social tide to retreat to our cable news corners and not engage. This is hard stuff, and it will be a difficult and messy at times, but I am optimistic because I see how fantastic and eager our students are to wade into this.

Finally, the third area of our focus is opportunity. Central to this is a continuing commitment to need-blind admissions and no-loan financial aid. We expect the number of our students on aid to increase over the next few years, and we will be enhancing our endowment to meet this need. Beyond this, we are looking at significantly broadening the definition of aid beyond room, board, tuition, and the traditional areas, to do our best at making sure that every student has equal access to the essential parts of a Bowdoin education that extend well beyond the classroom.

We are also looking at how we can continue to comprehensively help those great students who come less well prepared because of poor high school preparation, among other issues, to get the most out of Bowdoin as quickly as possible.

So that’s a sense of where we are doing.

Let me turn now to this challenge of the declining interest in study of the humanities.

Let me first start with a recent news story. Many of you, no doubt, saw the horrific news last week that a man used Facebook Live to broadcast in real time his random killing of another man. Not the first time Facebook Live has been used to broadcast a heinous crime. Facebook has come under massive criticism for allowing this broadcast to go on, and to go on for several hours. Let’s park this story for the moment.

What is it that a great liberal arts education should accomplish? I suggest that there are three things, at least:

• First, it is something for itself. It is an experience and a set of skills, sensibilities, and habits that allow us to live deeper, richer lives through an ability to understand our world and one another. To grow and learn throughout life.
• Second, it allows us to engage in a thoughtful and effective way in civic life. To understand the issues, to be skeptical, to reason well, to know how to use data, reason, and fact to effect change, and to be fearless in speaking truth to power.
• Third, the skills of critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and an ability to learn across domains, communication, and so forth prepare us for the work we do throughout our lives.

A liberal arts education is something special and powerful.

Central to a great liberal arts education are the humanities—the issues, questions, and knowledge that come from the disciplines of history, art, theater, philosophy, literature, language, and so on. They play a critical role in making real the three goals of a liberal arts education: richness of life, engagement in civic issues, and success in one’s career. Not to the exclusion, of course, of the sciences and social sciences, but as part of a complement of areas of inquiry, knowledge, and skills.

So, the bad news. As you all know, over the last decade or more, we have seen, at Bowdoin and looking at data from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) across all universities and colleges, a steady decline in the number of majors and in the number of students enrolled in humanities courses.  We are not at a place yet where things are perilous—there are still lots of students taking lots of courses and majoring in the humanities. But the trend is clear and requires that we address it. Otherwise, we risk undermining a critical pillar of a great liberal arts education.

So, what is going on?

We certainly don’t know everything, but one of the major culprits is the idea of “careerism.” The notion—the misguided notion—that if you major in the humanities you won’t be able to get a great job or do as well as students who major in the STEM fields or other areas.

What’s interesting and perplexing is that the data are clear—humanities majors do very well. They get great jobs across every industry and field of endeavor, and they are very successful at them. And perhaps most importantly, they have very satisfying professional lives. But this narrative, this myth, about the humanities and jobs persists, and it does our students and their families a great disservice. It creates real anxiety about how to best spend four years on our campus, about pursuing your intellectual passion, and therefore getting the most from a great liberal arts education. It changes the direction students take, away from what speaks to them and who they are and want to be.

I have talked with other presidents and deans about this, and an issue we all comment is on the natural concern of parents, especially first-generation parents. College is incredibly expensive, and the opportunity to come to any of our schools is a remarkable one. There is a natural desire to make sure that a student leaves here with the opportunity for a good job, and we have a responsibility to help them make this happen. This pervasive narrative about the humanities creates significant anxiety on the part of parents and students in this regard.

We see the other side of the coin as well, in the STEM fields, as an example. Some students are studying in these areas for purely instrumental reasons because they think this is the right path to professional success, but it is not the course of study, the questions, and the issues that speak to them, to who they are. They end up less happy and not doing their best work.

So, what might we do about this? Let me describe three things we are doing, and suggest an area for collective action and perhaps work by COFHE.

First, we are enhancing our career planning area. This sounds a bit weird, but the better our career planning process—providing the tools and skills to find the jobs that speak to our students, generally regardless of their major—then the more comfortable our students (and their families) will be in pursuing their intellectual passions. There are a number of specific things that we are looking at to separate as completely as possible the job search, and what it will take to be successful in finding a desired job, from intellectual interest as a student.

Second, we are looking at creating more opportunities for interdisciplinary learning, bringing together the major disciplines. Moving from thinking of courses and academic work in the traditional silos—biology, English, political science—and considering courses of study that are by definition large, sweeping problems that cut across all disciplines. I spoke earlier about our focus on the teaching and study of environment, a full-out interdisciplinary approach, a comprehensive way of thinking. This problem-based approach offers the opportunity for the knowledge, skills, and sensibilities of the humanities to come to the fore as a central player in the challenges we face.

The idea of the digital humanities, something most of us are engaged in in one form or another, is another area of interdisciplinary approach.

Third, here at Bowdoin we have a responsibility, and it starts with me, to use the data and the remarkable stories of our alumni, to do a much better job of making the compelling case for, in the first instance, why the humanities are an essential part of a great education and secondly, critically, how it is that these courses of study provide a viable path to pursuing virtually any career, and to be really good at it. We need to do—I need to do—a much better job of using the reality of the situation to dent the myth and to relieve the anxiety on the part of students and families.

Let me also suggest that since we all have a shared interest in this issue, this is something we could consider working on collectively, with organizations like COFHE and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, among others—puncturing the myth and providing the data, facts, and stories in a compelling way. Perhaps there are aspects of this issue that COFHE might want to consider for study.

So let me return to the Facebook story.

A few weeks ago, we had a Bowdoin Breakfast on campus—a gathering where we have speakers, often alumni, to campus to talk to our community about their work. We were fortunate enough to have a married couple, both Class of 2003, back with us. Let’s call them Dave and Charlotte, because those are their names. Dave was an archeology major and Charlotte was an English major. After Bowdoin they moved to California where they began work at Facebook. They spent several years there. Today he works at Airbnb and she is at Pinterest, all—like Facebook—iconic Silicon Valley enterprises. I asked them about the opportunities for humanists and social scientists in the tech and entrepreneurial world, and their enthusiastic and unequivocal response was that more than ever these skills are needed in order to deal with the human problems created by technology.

I am pretty sure that almost everyone would agree that Facebook should not allow murder and violent crime to be broadcast live, and I suspect they will develop a technology solution to this pretty fast. But this extreme example points to the more challenging problem facing Facebook and the rest of us. What is acceptable for broadcast on Facebook? On the internet? Who decides what we will read and see? What criteria will be used? How will the costs and benefits of the consequences of these decisions be weighed? These require an ability to think through what is “right,” why it is “right,” and to develop a set of principles to guide behavior in an area fraught with uncertainty, and one where criticism will be leveled no matter what the outcome. The bigger issues facing Facebook and other platforms are not technology issues. They are issues for humanists.

Dave and Charlotte provided the timeless answer to the question of the relevance of the humanities and liberal arts: to understand and contend with human problems.

Thank you, and again, welcome to Bowdoin College.